An Immersive Virtual Reality Serious Game to Enhance Earthquake Behavioral Responses and Post-earthquake Evacuation Preparedness in Buildings
Zhenan Feng, Vicente A. Gonz\'alez, Robert Amor, Michael Spearpoint,, Jared Thomas, Rafael Sacks, Ruggiero Lovreglio, Guillermo Cabrera-Guerrero

TL;DR
This paper presents an immersive virtual reality serious game designed to improve earthquake response and evacuation preparedness among hospital staff and visitors, demonstrating significant gains in knowledge and self-efficacy.
Contribution
It introduces a novel IVR serious game training system tailored for earthquake preparedness, tested in a real hospital setting with positive outcomes.
Findings
Significant increase in earthquake knowledge post-training
Enhanced self-efficacy in evacuation responses
Participants found the system engaging and easy to learn
Abstract
Enhancing the earthquake behavioral responses and post-earthquake evacuation preparedness of building occupants is beneficial to increasing their chances of survival and reducing casualties after the main shock of an earthquake. Traditionally, training approaches such as seminars, posters, videos or drills are applied to enhance preparedness. However, they are not highly engaging and have limited sensory capabilities to mimic life-threatening scenarios for the purpose of training potential participants. Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) and Serious Games (SG) as innovative digital technologies can be used to create training tools to overcome these limitations. In this study, we propose an IVR SG-based training system to improve earthquake behavioral responses and post-earthquake evacuation preparedness. Auckland City Hospital was chosen as a case study to test our IVR SG training system.…
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