Evacuation Drill Using Augmented Reality and a Handheld Head-Mounted Display

Abstract

Evacuation drills are very common as disaster education. However, an evacuation drill is not necessarily very realistic. To heighten the reality, we proposed an ICT-based evacuation drill (ICTBED) and developed ICTBED systems. One of our ICTBED systems aimed to achieve a high degree of reality using augmented reality (AR) and an immersive head-mounted display (HMD) but was impractical as disaster education. To make the system practical, we focused on AR and a handheld HMD (HHMD) and, then, prototyped the HHMD system. This paper describes the HHMD system and focuses on how to visualize disaster situations using AR. We report on a preliminary experiment at an educational event for children.