TY - JOUR
T1 - Earthquake Safety Training through Virtual Drills
AU - Li, Changyang
AU - Liang, Wei
AU - Quigley, Chris
AU - Zhao, Yibiao
AU - Yu, Lap Fai
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 1995-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2017/4
Y1 - 2017/4
N2 - Recent popularity of consumer-grade virtual reality devices, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, has enabled household users to experience highly immersive virtual environments. We take advantage of the commercial availability of these devices to provide an immersive and novel virtual reality training approach, designed to teach individuals how to survive earthquakes, in common indoor environments. Our approach makes use of virtual environments realistically populated with furniture objects for training. During a training, a virtual earthquake is simulated. The user navigates in, and manipulates with, the virtual environments to avoid getting hurt, while learning the observation and self-protection skills to survive an earthquake. We demonstrated our approach for common scene types such as offices, living rooms and dining rooms. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an evaluation by asking users to train in several rooms of a given scene type and then test in a new room of the same type. Evaluation results show that our virtual reality training approach is effective, with the participants who are trained by our approach performing better, on average, than those trained by alternative approaches in terms of the capabilities to avoid physical damage and to detect potentially dangerous objects.
AB - Recent popularity of consumer-grade virtual reality devices, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, has enabled household users to experience highly immersive virtual environments. We take advantage of the commercial availability of these devices to provide an immersive and novel virtual reality training approach, designed to teach individuals how to survive earthquakes, in common indoor environments. Our approach makes use of virtual environments realistically populated with furniture objects for training. During a training, a virtual earthquake is simulated. The user navigates in, and manipulates with, the virtual environments to avoid getting hurt, while learning the observation and self-protection skills to survive an earthquake. We demonstrated our approach for common scene types such as offices, living rooms and dining rooms. To test the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an evaluation by asking users to train in several rooms of a given scene type and then test in a new room of the same type. Evaluation results show that our virtual reality training approach is effective, with the participants who are trained by our approach performing better, on average, than those trained by alternative approaches in terms of the capabilities to avoid physical damage and to detect potentially dangerous objects.
KW - Virtual reality
KW - modeling and simulation
KW - virtual worlds training simulations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85017648856&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2656958
DO - 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2656958
M3 - Article
C2 - 28129163
AN - SCOPUS:85017648856
SN - 1077-2626
VL - 23
SP - 1275
EP - 1284
JO - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
IS - 4
M1 - 7829397
ER -