Emergent tools to promote understanding of natural hazards

Abstract

How to improve understanding of natural hazards is a major challenge for the research community. The multiple aspects of the hazard, from earthquakes to volcanic eruptions, landslides and coastal erosion, require new methods not only for data acquisition, but also for data processing and consequent management. In this respect, emergent tools, such as augmented and virtual reality, offer great versatility and effectiveness. Also, gaining insight into natural hazards with these tools can help communication to the general public as well as teaching to the digital native generation, particularly accustomed to these techniques for playing video games. In this presentation we describe our outreach activity by using augmented reality to help understand hazardous events, increasing preparedness and resilience.