The heat is on: exploring user behaviour in a multisensory virtual environment for fire evacuation

Shaw, Emily; Roper, Tessa; Nilsson, Tommy; Lawson, Glyn; Cobb, Sue V.G.; Miller, Daniel

Abstract

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 audio/visual-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.

Citation

Shaw, E., Roper, T., Nilsson, T., Lawson, G., Cobb, S. V., & Miller, D. (2019). The heat is on: exploring user behaviour in a multisensory virtual environment for fire evacuation. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systemshttps://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300856

• Conference Name: 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIG CHI 2019)
• Conference Location: Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
• Start Date: May 4, 2019
• End Date: May 9, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Dec 14, 2018
• Online Publication Date: May 2, 2019
• Publication Date: May 2, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 23, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 23, 2019
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450359702
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300856
• Keywords: Virtual Environments; VR; Multimodality; Thermal interfaces; Olfactory interfaces; User studies; Behaviour
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1491851
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3300856
• Related Public URLs: http://chi2019.acm.org/
• Additional Information: Published in: CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; Paper No. 626 ; ; Glasgow, Scotland Uk — May 04 - 09, 2019 ; ACM : New York, USA ©2019 ; ISBN: 978-1-4503-5970-2 doi 10.1145/3290605.3300856