ReliefWeb

Estela Oliva and Mandy George

Project name: Disasterscope
Project owner: Itamiya Laboratory
Release date: 2019
Locale: Japan
Languages: Japanese

URL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXAuPhmD_a0q1Q2f_Qtg0uw/videos

XR medium: AR with Smartphone
Hazards: Floods and Fire
Activity: Training and Awareness Raising
Age group: +8 years, adults

#1 Project Background

Disaster Scope is an augmented reality (AR) application which contains flooding and fire smoke simulations built by Itamiya laboratory, an organisation lead by Dr Tomoki Itamiya, a professor at Aichi University of Technology (Japan). Itamiya laboratory specialise in image processing and computer graphics technology, and have been working in the immersive technologies space for the last ten years.

Demo video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjuzHgeV8Uo

The 2011 Japan earthquake was the country’s most powerful earthquake recorded with a magnitude 9.0 and which also caused floods and a major tsunami. During this event over 300 elementary school-aged children died because they did not realise the risk of the tsunami and floods or they could not escape, although warnings were broadcasted to them (for example radio and TV reports). The children and adults were not able to imagine what a tsunami was like and did not understand the necessity for a rapid evacuation. The case of the Okawa elementary school was particularly tragic as students and teachers died because their tsunami evacuation plan was not defined and the teachers committed negligent acts. After these tragic events in Japan, Dr Tomoki Itamiya decided to focus on developing digital tools for DRR education using smartphones, VR and AR.

Disaster Scope can superimpose a virtual disaster situation such as flooding with debris and smoke in the actual scene where the user is located, by using a smartphone and low-cost paper viewer. With the aim of improving awareness and people’s understanding of disaster risk, the Disaster Scope has been used alongside a one hour DRR lecture in evacuation drills organised by public schools and municipalities in Japan. With an estimated time of three minutes per user experience, up to 500 school students can be trained per day by using a total of ten smartphone + AR viewer kits which are available for purchase or rental from the Lab.