Realistic Virtual Flood Experience System Using 360° Videos and 3D City Models Constructed from Building Footprints

2026-04-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the limitations of existing virtual flood experience systems, which often rely on non-georeferenced environments or lack realistic, site-specific visualization due to the absence of 3D building models for target areas. To overcome this, the authors propose a novel approach that integrates 360° video with automatically generated 3D urban models. By extruding widely available 2D building footprints into plausible 3D structures and accurately registering them within the 360° video space, the method enables immersive flood scenario visualization without requiring high-fidelity data such as CityGML. Field deployment in Memuro, Hokkaido, demonstrates that the system significantly enhances residents’ ability to envision local flood evacuation scenarios, thereby validating its effectiveness and practicality for disaster risk communication.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: 3D Computer Vision
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization

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° 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° 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° 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.

Problem

• virtual flood experience
• 360° video
• 3D city models
• flood risk communication
• building footprints

Innovation

• 360° video
• 3D city modeling
• building footprint extrusion
• flood visualization
• virtual disaster experience