Design of Virtual Reality content for supervising abusement

Abstract

The government has defined domestic violence as one of the four major social evils and tried to prepare laws and systems to prevent it. Nevertheless, domestic violence has emerged as a serious social issue, and compare to the number of domestic violence cases that are constantly increasing, the report rate of domestic violence is significantly lower. This suggests the need to improve citizens' perception of domestic violence as the issue to solve it together in society, not as a private matter at home. Most of existing contents for preventing domestic violence and improving awareness are simple viewing forms of video contents, which have little effect on recognition. We aim to confirm the possibility of improving social awareness about domestic violence by producing Virtual Reality (VR) contents that have great features of user's immersion and empathy. In this VR content, the user can interact with various objects in the virtual reality of domestic violence and directly or indirectly experience the victim's position. Users who view the violent environment from the victim's point of view can have a subjective empathy for the problem, which is expected to induce more active awareness about domestic violence.