The Heat is On: Exploring User Behaviour in a Multisensory Virtual Environment for Fire Evacuation

02/12/2019
by   Emily Shaw, et al.
0

Understanding validity of user behaviour in Virtual Environments (VEs) is critical as they are increasingly being used for serious Health and Safety applications such as predicting human behaviour and training in hazardous situations. This paper presents a comparative study exploring user behaviour in VE-based fire evacuation and investigates whether this is affected by the addition of thermal and olfactory simulation. Participants (N=43) were exposed to a virtual fire in an office building. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of participant attitudes and behaviours found deviations from those we would expect in real life (e.g. pre-evacuation actions), but also valid behaviours like fire avoidance. Potentially important differences were found between multisensory and audiovisual-only conditions (e.g. perceived urgency). We conclude VEs have significant potential in safety-related applications, and that multimodality may afford additional uses in this context, but the identified limitations of behavioural validity must be carefully considered to avoid misapplication of the technology.

READ FULL TEXT

page 3

page 6

research
10/01/2019

Immersive virtual worlds: Multi-sensory virtual environments for health and safety training

Virtual environments (VEs) offer potential benefits to health and safety...
research
04/10/2019

Is Two Better than One? Effects of Multiple Agents on User Persuasion

Virtual humans need to be persuasive in order to promote behaviour chang...
research
02/20/2014

Expressing social attitudes in virtual agents for social training games

The use of virtual agents in social coaching has increased rapidly in th...
research
11/22/2019

Construction of a Validated Virtual Embodiment Questionnaire

User embodiment is important for many Virtual Reality (VR) applications,...
research
11/21/2002

Thinking Adaptive: Towards a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory

In this paper we name some of the advantages of virtual laboratories; an...
research
02/13/2020

Understanding individual behaviour: from virtual to physical patterns

As "Big Data" has become pervasive, an increasing amount of research has...
research
02/16/2020

Understanding the spatial burden of gender-based violence: Modelling patterns of violence in Nairobi, Kenya through geospatial information

We present statistical techniques for analyzing global positioning syste...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset