Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment

Moussaïd, Mehdi; Kapadia, Mubbasir; Thrash, Tyler; Sumner, Robert W.; Groß, Markus; Helbing, Dirk; Hölscher, Christoph

doi:10.1098/rsif.2016.0414

Cited by 199 publications

(134 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Integrated with virtual reality (VR) such animations have the potential to immerse a participant in higher stress than normal yet practically safe situations [16][17][18]. A believable crowd of virtual characters must move realistically where individuals anticipate collisions [19] and avoid sudden movements [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drawing power of virtual crowds

Jorjafki

Sagarin

Butail

2018

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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In 1969, social psychologist Milgram and his colleagues conducted an experiment on a busy city street where passers-by witnessed a set of actors spontaneously looking up towards a building. The experiment showed that the crowd's propensity to mimic the actor's gaze increased with the number of actors that looked up. This form of behavioural contagion is found in many social organisms and is central to how information travels through large groups. With the advancement of virtual reality and its continued application towards understanding human response to crowd behaviour, it remains to be verified if behavioural contagion occurs in walkable virtual environments, and how it compares with results from real-world experiments. In this study, we adapt Milgram's experiment for virtual environments and use it to reproduce behavioural contagion. Specifically, we construct a replica of an indoor location and combine two established pedestrian motion models to create an interactive crowd of 60 virtual characters that walk through the indoor location. The stimulus group comprised a subset of the characters who look up at a random time as the participants explore the virtual environment. Our results show that the probability of looking up by a participant is dependent on the size of the stimulus group saturating to near certainty when three or more characters look up. The role of stimulus size was also evident when participant actions were compared with survey responses which showed that more participants selected to not look up even though they saw characters redirect their gaze upwards when the size of the stimulus group was small. Participants also spent more time looking up and exhibited frequent head turns with a larger stimulus group. Results from this study provide evidence that behavioural contagion can be triggered in the virtual environment, and can be used to build and test complex hypotheses for understanding human behaviour in a variety of crowd scenarios.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drawing power of virtual crowds

Jorjafki

Sagarin

Butail

2018

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…Moussaïd et al [13] studied movement patterns of crowds in an immersive 3D virtual environment, in which the crowds were controlled by real people.…”

Section: Evacuationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimized evacuation route based on crowd simulation

et al. 2017

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An evacuation plan helps people move away from an area or a building. To assist rapid evacuation, we present an algorithm to compute the optimal route for each local region. The idea is to reduce congestion and maximize the number of evacuees arriving at exits in each time span. Our system considers crowd distribution, exit locations, and corridor widths when determining optimal routes. It also simulates crowd movements during route optimization. As a basis, we expect that neighboring crowds who take different evacuation routes should arrive at respective exits at nearly the same time. If this is not the case, our system updates the routes of the slower crowds. As crowd simulation is non-linear, the optimal route is computed in an iterative manner. The system repeats until an optimal state is achieved. In addition to directly computing optimal routes for a situation, our system allows the structure of the situation to be decomposed, and determines the routes in a hierarchical manner. This strategy not only reduces the computational cost but also enables crowds in different regions to evacuate with different priorities. Experimental results, with visualizations, demonstrate the feasibility of our evacuation route optimization method.

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“…Moussaïd et al [29] constructed a desktop personal computer (PC)-based multi-person collaborative virtual environment. They carried out crowd movement experiments in both real and virtual scenes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The system used infrared devices to track user movements, and shutter glasses to provide immersion and access to head activity data. However, desktop PC-based VR [29] is less immersive than state-of-the-art helmet mounted display (HMD) VR, and large CAVE-like systems [31] are expensive.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Heterogeneous Distributed Virtual Geographic Environment—Potential Application in Spatiotemporal Behavior Experiments

Shen

Gong

Liang

et al. 2018

IJGI

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Due to their strong immersion and real-time interactivity, helmet-mounted virtual reality (VR) devices are becoming increasingly popular. Based on these devices, an immersive virtual geographic environment (VGE) provides a promising method for research into crowd behavior in an emergency. However, the current cheaper helmet-mounted VR devices are not popular enough, and will continue to coexist with personal computer (PC)-based systems for a long time. Therefore, a heterogeneous distributed virtual geographic environment (HDVGE) could be a feasible solution to the heterogeneous problems caused by various types of clients, and support the implementation of spatiotemporal crowd behavior experiments with large numbers of concurrent participants. In this study, we developed an HDVGE framework, and put forward a set of design principles to define the similarities between the real world and the VGE. We discussed the HDVGE architecture, and proposed an abstract interaction layer, a protocol-based interaction algorithm, and an adjusted dead reckoning algorithm to solve the heterogeneous distributed problems. We then implemented an HDVGE prototype system focusing on subway fire evacuation experiments. Two types of clients are considered in the system: PC, and all-in-one VR. Finally, we evaluated the performances of the prototype system and the key algorithms. The results showed that in a low-latency local area network (LAN) environment, the prototype system can smoothly support 90 concurrent users consisting of PC and all-in-one VR clients. HDVGE provides a feasible solution for studying not only spatiotemporal crowd behaviors in normal conditions, but also evacuation behaviors in emergency conditions such as fires and earthquakes. HDVGE could also serve as a new means of obtaining observational data about individual and group behavior in support of human geography research.

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Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment

Cited by 199 publications

References 54 publications

Drawing power of virtual crowds

Drawing power of virtual crowds

Optimized evacuation route based on crowd simulation

A Heterogeneous Distributed Virtual Geographic Environment—Potential Application in Spatiotemporal Behavior Experiments

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