Follower behavior under stress in immersive VR

Understanding human decision making is a key requirement to improve crowd simulation models so that they can better mimic real human behavior. It is often difficult to study human decision making during dangerous situations because of the complexity of the scenarios and situations to be simulated. I...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Ríos Jerez, Alejandro|||0000-0003-1210-8951, Pelechano Gómez, Núria|||0000-0002-1437-245X
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/192616
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/192616
https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10055-020-00428-8
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Decision making
Virtual reality
Crowds -- Computer simulation
Crowd following
Immersive VR
Studies of human behavior
Decisió, Presa de
Realitat virtual
Multituds -- Simulació per ordinador
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial
Descripción
Sumario:Understanding human decision making is a key requirement to improve crowd simulation models so that they can better mimic real human behavior. It is often difficult to study human decision making during dangerous situations because of the complexity of the scenarios and situations to be simulated. Immersive virtual reality offers the possibility to carry out such experiments without exposing participants to real danger. In the real world, it has often been observed that people tend to follow others in certain situations (e.g., unfamiliar environments or stressful situations). In this paper, we study human following behavior when it comes to exit choice during an evacuation of a train station. We have carried out immersive VR experiments under different levels of stress (alarm only or alarm plus fire), and we have observed how humans consistently tend to follow the crowd regardless of the levels of stress. Our results show that decision making is strongly influenced by the behavior of the virtual crowd: the more virtual people running, the more likely are participants to simply follow others. The results of this work could improve behavior simulation models during crowd evacuation, and thus build more plausible scenarios for training firefighters.