Nabla-Zero, a Japanese IT company specializing in disaster prevention, has released a free application for the iPhone that measures if a building is tall enough to provide shelter from a tsunami.

The application, called “AR TSUNAMI-CAMERA”, uses the iPhone’s camera and augmented reality to transpose a virtual image of a wave up to 25-meters against actual scenery. Most of the tsunami caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake were 3 to 10-meteres high.

According to Nabla-Zero, the application was developed at the request of local governing bodies in tsunami-affected areas to be used for disaster prevention education programs in public schools.

An application for Android devices is planned to be released in the future.

Partly because the unprecedented scale of last year’s disaster, many people who lost their lives in the tsunami believed they were on high enough ground to be safe. This application should provide a useful tool to gauge how safe our surroundings really are, especially in such unexpected circumstances.

Source: Nabla-Zero Co. Ltd