Experiencing Natural Disasters in Virtual Reality

Describing the results of disaster research to a lay audience of people from different backgrounds is challenging. Virtual Reality (VR) is well suited to resolve this situation. Our multidisciplinary research team at the University of Michigan has developed a VR interactive experience under the auspices of the project: Interdependencies in Community Resilience (https://icor.engin.umich.edu/) funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) that can be used to experience earthquakes and hurricanes in virtual communities. The experience was made using the game engine Unity3D for the Oculus Rift VR headset, to run on Windows OS. As a stand-alone application, it allows users to see and experience the destruction and aftermath of two natural disaster examples in a city setting. Through a UI menu, the experience allows users to pause, rewind and fast-forward the experience as they freely move through the 3D space. The application can be extended to add more disasters through the source code we provide, but the developer needs to have experience with Unity 3D.