Using Digital Game, Augmented Reality, and Head Mounted Displays for Immediate-Action Commander Training

Disaster education focusing on how we should take immediate actions after disasters strike is essential to protect our lives. However, children find it difficult to understand such disaster education. Instead of disaster education to children, adults should properly instruct them to take immediate actions in the event of a disaster. We refer to such adults as Immediate-Action Commanders (IACers) and attach importance to technology-enhanced IACer training programs with high situational and audio-visual realities. To realize such programs, we focused on digital game, augmented reality (AR) and head-mounted displays (HMDs). We prototyped three AR systems that superimpose interactive virtual objects onto HMDs’ real-time vision or a trainee’s actual view based on interactive fictional scenarios. In addition, the systems are designed to realize voice-based interactions between the virtual objects (i.e., virtual children) and the trainee. According to a brief comparative survey, the AR system equipped with a smartphone-based binocular opaque HMD (Google Cardboard) has the most promising practical system for technology-enhanced IACer training programs.

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