Realistic Virtual Flood Experience System Using 360{\deg} Videos and 3D City Models Constructed from Building Footprints

TL;DR

This paper presents a virtual flood experience system combining 360-degree videos with automatically generated 3D city models from 2D building footprints, enhancing realism and local relevance for flood risk communication.

Contribution

The novel framework integrates 360-degree videos with automatically constructed 3D models from 2D footprints, enabling photorealistic flood visualization without pre-existing city models.

Findings

User study showed improved ability to envision flood evacuation scenarios.

System effectively visualizes floods in real-world environments.

Framework is scalable and applicable to regions lacking detailed 3D city data.

Abstract

Virtual flood experience systems, which enable users to vividly experience flooding, are attracting increasing attention as effective tools for communicating flood risks. However, existing systems typically rely on virtual cities that do not correspond to real locations and often lack sufficient photorealism, limiting users' ability to relate scenarios to their own surroundings. Although 360{\deg} video-based virtual environments offer a simple and scalable way to visually replicate real-world scenes, effective 3D flood visualization in these environments typically requires 3D building geometry of the target area, which is not readily available in many regions. To address this limitation, we propose a new virtual flood experience framework that integrates 360{\deg} videos with 3D models automatically constructed from widely available 2D building footprints. By extruding footprints to plausible heights and spatially aligning the constructed models with 360{\deg} videos, our framework enables 3D flood visualization in photorealistic environments without relying on pre-existing city models such as CityGML. We demonstrate the framework in Memuro, Hokkaido, Japan, an area vulnerable to river flooding. A user study with local residents showed that the proposed system enhances users' ability to envision location-specific flood evacuation situations, demonstrating its potential as an effective tool for disaster risk communication and education.