Exploring the influencing factors of wall‐following behavior in a virtual reality fire evacuation game

• Published in: Computer animation and virtual worlds Vol. 34; no. 1
• Main Authors: Wang, Jing, Liu, Tingting, Liu, Zhen, Chai, Yanjie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01.01.2023; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: environmental familiarity; Evacuation; Games; neighbor behavior; Smoke; smoke level; Virtual environments; Virtual reality; VR game; wall‐following behavior
• ISSN: 1546-4261; 1546-427X
• DOI: 10.1002/cav.2122

In most of fire evacuation, people follow the walls. The reasons behind this escape behavior have not been verified by experiments. In this article, we design a virtual reality (VR) fire evacuation game with realistic virtual environment to explore the effects of smoke concentration, individual familiarity with the environment, and neighbor behavior on individual wall‐following behavior. Individuals' familiarity with the environment is obtained through experimental training and the frequencies of their behavior along the wall at different smoke concentrations are recorded. From a subjective perspective, we use the presence scale to assess the immersion of the designed VR game. The results show that users have a good level of presence in the designed VR game. From an objective perspective, we analyze the game data using a statistically based approach. The analysis shows that high concentration of smoke, unfamiliar with the environment will increase individuals' reliance on walls, but neighbor behavior along the wall has no significant effect on individual wall‐following behavior. A VR fire evacuation game is designed to explore three influencing factors of wall‐following behavior, namely, smoke concentration, personal familiarity with the environment, and neighbor behavior. The analysis shows that high concentration of smoke, unfamiliar with the environment will increase individual's reliance on walls, but neighbor behavior along the wall has no significant effect on the wall‐following behavior.