Evacuation Instruction Training System Using Augmented Reality and a Smartphone-based Head Mounted Display

Recent years have witnessed an increase in large-scale disasters, which has led to an increased focus on disaster education. Thus, we developed a digital game-based evacuation drill system that encourages students to think about proper evacuation strategies using tablets or immersive head-mounted displays (HMDs). Our current focus is on how to encourage adults (e.g. teachers) to think about proper evacuation strategies and train them to convey evacuation instructions to children (e.g. students). We developed a prototype of an evacuation instruction training (EIT) system using augmented reality (AR) and a smartphone-based MID. Our EIT system presents virtual disaster situations by superimposing virtual children, i.e. three-dimensional computer graphics (3DCG) characters, in real-time virtual disaster situations captured by a smartphone. The virtual children have various reactions in the given disaster situations, whereas the adults (i.e. HMD wearers) are expected to provide proper evacuation instructions to these virtual children while viewing the virtual disaster situations. We conducted a preliminary experiment and found that our EIT system was largely accepted by adults (i.e. teachers).