Tsunami Evacuation Drill System Using Smart Glasses

Evacuation drills are commonly conducted as traditional disaster education to reduce damages from natural disasters. However participants are not always interested in or committed to such drills. To improve this situation, we focused on Edutainment and proposed game-based evacuation drill (GBED) using the Real-World Edutainment (RWE) program. There are two types of GBED systems, i.e. the Tablet-based GBED (T-GBED) and the AR and HMD-based GBED (AH-GBED). We conducted GBED at several schools and determined that it can improve student motivation for disaster prevention. Subduction-zone earthquakes frequently generate tsunamis and can cause catastrophic damage especially to coastal areas. Thus people in coastal areas must move very quickly to evacuation sites when a massive earthquake occurs. Both GBED systems cannot be used directly for tsunami evacuation drills because the participants will not want to sprint while holding a tablet or wearing a HMD and have time to stop to view the digital materials. In this study, we propose a tsunami evacuation drill (TED) and have developed a TED system. The TED system uses smart glasses (a lightweight optical see-through HMD) which allows participants to view digital materials while moving quickly.