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Can Hazard Risk be Communicated through a Virtual Experience?
Author(s) -
Mitchell Jerry T.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/1467-7717.00060
Subject(s) - hazard , virtual reality , cyberspace , computer security , computer science , internet privacy , engineering , risk analysis (engineering) , the internet , human–computer interaction , business , world wide web , chemistry , organic chemistry
Cyberspace, defined by William Gibson as a consensual hallucination, now refers to all computer‐generated interactive environments. Virtual reality, one of a class of interactive cyberspaces, allows us to create and interact directly with objects not available in the everyday world. Despite successes in the entertainment and aviation industries, this technology has been called a ‘solution in search of a problem’. The purpose of this commentary is to suggest such a problem: the inability to acquire experience with a hazard to motivate mitigation. Direct experience with a hazard has been demonstrated as a powerful incentive to adopt mitigation measures. While we lack the ability to summon hazard events at will in order to gain access to that experience, a virtual environment can provide an arena where potential victims are exposed to a hazard's effects. Immersion as an active participant within the hazard event through virtual reality may stimulate users to undertake mitigation steps that might otherwise remain undone. This paper details the possible direction in which virtual reality may be applied to hazards mitigation through a discussion of the technology, the role of hazard experience, the creation of a hazard simulation and the issues constraining implementation.