Evaluating Individual Emergency Evacuation Behaviour in Smart Cities: A Focus on using VR

By Reinout Wiltenburg

Abstract
In smart cities, additional data is displayed in a virtual version of the real environment. One of the components of a smart city is public safety. Public safety in buildings can be improved by informing people about emergency routes and exits. This results in improved wayfinding skills. An upcoming technology to research emergency behaviour is Virtual Reality (VR).

In this research, first a literature review was conducted to devise a general approach for creating a VR application. Based on this, a VR application for the Omnia building at the Wageningen Campus was developed. Relevant challenges and issues that occurred during the development of the application and their solutions have been collected, and the findings can be used by other researchers. The resulting application was used to compare evacuation behaviour between a control group and a group that got a layer of extra information during their exploration of the building: a Smart City Data Layer (SCDL). 34 participants, all students, took part in the experiment. Contrary to the hypothesis, participants from the SCDL group were significantly less efficient with escaping the building, probably due to over-information.

Before and after the experiment, participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their experience and the application itself. Analysis of the results showed correlations associated to (e.g.) emotions, cybersickness and performance. Also, future features and improvements for this and comparable applications were drawn from the questionnaire results. Most important are improving performance and realism of the digital environment.