The role of immersive visualization technologies in natural hazard risk communication

Recent research links climate change to the increased frequency and severity of disaster events, resulting in the loss of life, property losses, displacement, and psychological harm to the global population. This heightens the need to improve natural hazard resilience. Existing research studies have called for mitigating actions for disaster risk reduction and highlighted effective risk communication is critical in shaping natural hazard risk perception and protective action decisions. However, the existing methods of risk communication can only provide households with generalized and abstract natural hazard information, leading to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. This dissertation research explores the use of Virtual Reality (VR) to supplement Natural Hazard Risk Communication (NHRC). Through a comprehensive survey of United States sub-urban residents, a VR-based tornado simulation, and human subjects’ experiments, this study evaluated the readiness of communities to embrace VR for NHRC. Additionally, the study assessed the efficacy of VR in enhancing NHRC compared to traditional 2D video methods. Furthermore, this dissertation also investigated individuals' risk perceptions and habituation behavior of different NHRC modalities in VR. The study results showed that demographics of age and gender could play a role in the willingness to adopt VR for NHRC, and VR supplementation to NHRC led to a substantial decline in risk perception for 2D video conditions compared to the baseline, which suggests that immersive visualization has the potential to deliver more effective sensitization for future designs of fully immersive VR-based NHRC systems. Finally, we found that the haptics modality had the highest effect on risk perception, shelter time, protective action intent, and trust in the tornado risk communication than the text and audio modalities while also recording higher risk perception and the slightest tendency to habituate across both groups of risk-takers and non-risk-takers. Overall, this dissertation provides insights into the adoption strategies for VR in NHRC and the effectiveness of immersive natural hazard risk communication strategies. The findings of this study contribute to the design of appropriate and effective natural hazard risk communication systems in the future, aiding informed decision-making and sensitizing proactive measures to safeguard individuals and communities for disaster resilience.