Development of a virtual flood experience system and its suitability as a flood risk communication tool

Abstract

Preventing late evacuation has been a challenge in Japan's flood management. Our hypothesis is that people often have little idea about how dangerous a flood can be and thus do not understand the importance of early evacuation. To help them realize the possible risk of flooding, we developed the Virtual Flood Experience System (VFES) using virtual reality (VR) technology. This tool is also expected to improve flood risk communication and flood evacuation training. We evaluated the realness of a virtual flood reconstructed by VFES and conducted an evacuation behaviour experiment using VFES. This paper reports an overview of VFES, including the results of the evaluation and experiment conducted in Aga Town, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The results confirmed that VFES can successfully reconstruct the flood conditions caused by Typhoon No.19 in 2019 and quantitatively record the difference in evacuation behaviour and the time required to select appropriate evacuation behaviour between individuals with knowledge of flood risk and those without, indicating its high potential as an effective risk commutation tool capable of providing virtual flood experiences and assisting behavioural psychology experiments.