Non-Player Characters for Evacuation Training in Metaverse: Preliminary Experiment

Abstract

Evacuation training is indispensable in terms of surviving disasters. Recently, virtual reality technologies have been used to facilitate evacuation training. The authors previously proposed the Evacuation Training in Metaverse (ETM) system. This system is currently being evaluated in a prototyping phase, where many users can spend time in a three-dimensional virtual university campus. In the ETM system, an earthquake occurs suddenly, and the users must determine various actions, e.g., whether to evacuate and where to evacuate. However, the ETM system does not always have a sufficient number of active users. Thus, the ETM system can generate non-player characters (NPC) based on the evacuation logs of previous participants. This paper overviews the ETM system and describes the method used to generate NPCs. In addition, the results of a preliminary comparative experiment are discussed.