Development and Evaluation of VR Earthquake Experience System with Automatic Modeling Function of Indoor Environment

Abstract

Earthquakes could cause enormous human casualties, and it is crucial to reduce their risks through anti-earthquake procedures. One important approach to enhance the anti-earthquake procedures is to arouse a fear of earthquakes. Immersive earthquake experience systems based-on virtual reality (VR) technology have been developed to serve this purpose but the contents need to be created manually by artists, that limits its practicability. For this study, a new earthquake experience system is proposed in which indoor environments are 3D-scanned, and virtual environments are automatically created. It can be expected that the proposed system reduces the cost of the VR-based earthquake experience system, while still retaining effectiveness in fear-causing. To examine whether the system is actually capable of causing a fear toward earthquakes, a subjective evaluation was conducted. The results showed that the perceived seismic intensity scales were consistently lower than simulated intensity scales, while the system could actually cause a fear toward earthquakes.