**1. Introduction**

With the increased prevalence of smartphones and popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), substantial research and development have been made in pursuit of more cost-effective and high-performance sensor technologies [1, 2] and graphical processing units, which have led to the production of affordable virtual and augmented reality devices [3]. These developments allowed researchers in many fields (e.g., astronomy, psychology, medicine) to create controlled virtual environments that permit users to interact with digitally generated stimuli [4–6]. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are presented here as present and future alternatives for the efficient training of human resources, not only in the industrial field, but in every aspect of real world, of real life. The virtual recreation which objective is to transport the user to fully digitized and interactive environments, has allowed for the simulation of real processes and situations, an adequate way to reduce training times, prevent errors, or even improve the quality of products and actions. In the field of environmental sciences and natural disaster management

(NDM), public, scientists, decision-makers, and professionals can benefit from virtual and augmented reality applications to simulate various and complex scenarios, constituting a realistic and safe workspace for repetition, precise measurements, and improved knowledge [7, 8].

In this research it is presented how VR and AR are applied to digitally recreate the real-life setting when an earthquake hit. In the preparedness before disasters happen, the simulated scenarios allow the user to interact with buildings, houses, foundations, streets, and buried pipes, on the one hand, and with soil strata, rock basement, ground motions, fissures, and cracks, on the other. Tricking the human perceptual system into believing that is being part of the virtual city, it is guaranteed complete focus on the effects of the seismic shaking.

By the seamless blending between a real environment and computer-generated virtual objects, the resulting mixture supplements the natural environment (the phenomena, the infrastructure, and soils responses) rather than replacing it with simplified conceptions. The virtual objects incrusted in the reality display information about structures characteristics and soils properties that the users cannot directly detect with their own senses. This information conveyed by the virtual objects helps a user perform better NDM-tasks. The concepts of VR/AR activated are simulation, interaction, artificiality, immersion, telepresence, full-body immersion, and network communication. The input information is compiled from the September 19th, 2021, earthquake files (accelerograms and geotechnical zonation where the monitoring station is placed), records of large settlements, fissures, and cracks as well as total and partial collapses of buildings and damage to buried pipes. The devastating earthquake of 2017 provided the opportunity to evaluate how citizens and the government prepare and respond to emergencies due to natural phenomena, particularly the seismic phenomenon, to generate the necessary improvements at each stage of natural disaster management.
