Real World Edutainment (RWE) is an educational computer game focusing on a game story and human-human interaction in the real world and aims mainly at increasing learning motivation. At an educational event, children learned phenomena of light through the RWE where they were able to observe real phenomena (real-world objects) and view multimedia learning materials.
Japan is in the Pacific Rim Seismic Belt, and earthquakes happen frequently. Foreigners who lack the necessary earthquake knowledge and escape skills may not survive strong earthquakes in Japan. Therefore, it is essential to provide earthquake education to these foreigners. Since rich-formed earthquake education has been available for foreigners living in Japan, this research works to improve the earthquake education situation for foreigners who intend to visit Japan. Receiving earthquake education in advance helps enhance foreigners’ earthquake risk awareness, gain more opportunities to master earthquake survival knowledge, and build earthquake survival confidence. This paper proposed a learning model called ‘FOE+G’ to achieve this research goal. ‘FOE’ means the frequency of occurrence of earthquakes in Japan, and ‘G’ means gamification. A prototype system in the form of a cross-platform application has been developed to confirm that the learning model improves earthquake education for the target audience. The application delivers an earthquake notification to target objects each time an eligible earthquake occurs in Japan. The High-frequency earthquakes in Japan lead to relatively frequent updates, which enable users to build earthquake awareness, realise the importance of earthquake education, and participate more actively in it. Furthermore, gamification is employed in the application to prompt participation in earthquake education.
Niche-Learning is a learning style using digital signage (DS) that lets students learn by viewing short digital learning materials (NL materials) on a large public display during class break times. At the author's university, a simple DS system has delivered NL materials for about 4 years, but many students do not view the NL materials. One cause of this undesirable situation may be that NL materials are one-sidedly delivered. Therefore, the author made the DS system interactive. The interactive DS system called “IVS” superimposes students standing in front of the display on quiz slideshows. In addition, the IVS enables the students to answer quiz questions in a slideshow by their simple body movement.
Recent years have witnessed an increase in large-scale disasters, which has led to an increased focus on disaster education. Thus, we developed a digital game-based evacuation drill system that encourages students to think about proper evacuation strategies using tablets or immersive head-mounted displays (HMDs). Our current focus is on how to encourage adults (e.g. teachers) to think about proper evacuation strategies and train them to convey evacuation instructions to children (e.g. students). We developed a prototype of an evacuation instruction training (EIT) system using augmented reality (AR) and a smartphone-based HMD. Our EIT system presents virtual disaster situations by superimposing virtual children, i.e. three-dimensional computer graphics (3DCG) characters, in real-time virtual disaster situations captured by a smartphone. The virtual children have various reactions in the given disaster situations, whereas the adults (i.e. HMD wearers) are expected to provide proper evacuation instructions to these virtual children while viewing the virtual disaster situations. We conducted a preliminary experiment and found that our EIT system was largely accepted by adults (i.e. teachers).
Disaster education is indispensable for people to survive disasters. We propose the ICT-based evacuation drill (ICTBED) that aims to provide realistic simulated evacuation experiences by presenting digital materials that express disaster situations. Previous ICTBEDs have found that participants tended to walk towards the evacuation sites although they should sprint due to time constraints. This finding indicates that the ICTBED cannot provide the participants with realistic simulated evacuation experiences. To enhance reality and promote speedy evacuation, we propose an AR-based evacuee visualisation (AREV) to visualise how past participants were evacuating during the ICTBED based on their evacuation logs. The AREV expresses evacuees walking or sprinting on roads by superimposing evacuee avatars on a real-time vision captured by a tablet's rear camera based on previous participants' evaluation logs recorded in the ICTBED. We establish an ICTBED model that intentionally leads to evacuation failure of the participants and then we prototype the AREV.
Natural disasters, such as tsunami, claim lives of many coastal residents every year. Therefore, tsunami evacuation drills are important for costal residents to survive tsunami. We developed a tsunami evacuation drill system that enables participants to evacuate and move to a shelter while occasionally glancing at a map-based tsunami simulation on mobile devices.The system has the following advantages: (1) a practitioner can easily customise the simulation, (2) the simulation can be displayed on a web browser and (3) the participants’ evacuation routes can be recorded and displayed on the simulation system.We conducted a preliminary comparative experiment with 18 university students and found that the developed system was accepted more by participants using a tablet rather than by those using smartglasses.
"Evacuation training is important as disaster education that covers how to survive disasters. However, traditional evacuation training does not provide realistic simulated evacuation experience (SEE). To provide the such, we developed game-based evacuation training (GBET), where trainees are required to reach a shelter in the real world within a time limit while making decisions against virtual disaster situations presented as digital contents (e.g. video and single-choice question) on GPS-enabled smartphones or tablets. However, the GBET was insufficient in the audiovisual reality. To provide a more realistic SEE, we created an evacuation training using scenario-based augmented reality (AR) game that integrates marker-based AR and scenariobased game. Although only applicable in indoor activities, the evacuation training (the extended GBET system) presents AR that expresses disaster situations (e.g. flood and fire) by superimposing threedimensional computer graphics onto the real-time view through a handheld head-mounted display."
