屋内環境の自動モデル化機能を備えたVR地震体験システムの開発と評価

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.