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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is challenging to evacuate people quickly and safely in large complex buildings in emergencies. With the rapid development of smart mobile devices, the research of augmented reality (AR) technology in emergency evacuation is gradually becoming a hot topic. Meanwhile, virtual agents have been widely used in numerous fields and have been proved to be helpful for guidance. Therefore, this study proposes an indoor evacuation guidance system with an AR virtual agent. The system uses smartphones as mobile terminals to deliver optimal exit path directions for users in real-time. An AR virtual agent is used to guide users to evacuate quickly and safely in complex building environments. In this paper, we take a museum as an example and use the permanent features in the museum as markers for the AR application to activate the virtual agent, which plays the role of a guide to help users evacuate the building. This paper describes the design and implementation of the system, and conducts a user study at a local museum to evaluate the system's usability. The results show that the system can effectively provide guidance and help users to evacuate indoors in the emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an earthquake occurs, indoor objects oscillate and fall, creating a hazardous evacuation environment. However, physical effects of oscillating and falling indoor objects during earthquakes are often ignored in the existing crowd emergency evacuation simulation studies. As a result, existing models will produce predictions that differ from the outcomes of real events. Here we propose a physics-based simulation model for an indoor seismic event scenario, focusing on movable and flexible components. We predict the motion of movable components during earthquakes using simulations based on seismic data and physical laws. In doing this, we also simulate oscillations of flexible components using a driven harmonic oscillator model. The results showed that the simulated scenario had a high degee of physical realism and rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During an earthquake, interior nonstructural components of a building will be damaged. The damaged objects will obstruct pedestrians' evacuation routes and increase casualties. But this issue has received scant attention in evacuation simulation research. This paper focuses on this issue and proposes an indoor seismic evacuation model to simulate crowd evacuation in a dynamic environment. A physical model of nonstructural components is presented to simulate the dynamics of the indoor scenario. The flow field algorithm is constructed to guide pedestrian's avoidance behaviors globally to reflect the impact of environmental changes on indoor crowd path selection, and a modified social force model is built to simulate the joint influence of seismic forces and the environment on pedestrian motion states. The results of the experiments shows that the proposed model can generate realistic evacuation scene and rational evacuation routes in the earthquake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In emergency situation, mass panic often causes more causalities than the disaster itself. The crowd emotional model could be used to simulate how crowd behavior in emergency scenarios and be helpful for developing crowd evacuation plans in emergency situations. However, existing crowd emotional models usually set model parameters in an empirical manner and are not validated by real cases. In this paper, a crowd emotional model is proposed to simulate the crowd movement in outdoor emergency situations. First of all, the crowd entropy and the movement difference are proposed to describe the emotional impact of the crowd scene on the agents. The perception of vision and hearing are considered, and the calculation formulas of the agent's emotional intensity and crowd emotional contagion are proposed. By calculating individual trajectories in the real video, the cumulative differences between the movements of the real crowd and the corresponding virtual crowd are analyzed. At last, a multi‐parameter optimization method is implemented by the differential evolution algorithm. To verify the parameters in models, three videos which are generated from three real cases, including explosion attack, shooting incident, and crowd disturbance are selected for experimental verification. The results showed that the proposed model could be a feasible method for optimizing parameters to simulate the emergency scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terrorist attacks, crowd emotions have a significant impact on the evacuation process. Current researches of crowd emotion modeling are of great importance in formulating emergency plans. However, existing crowd emotional models do not describe the perceptual process in detail. They overlook the audiovisual linkage (AVL), and do not demonstrate head-turning behaviors in evacuation simulation. We propose an AVL-based perception model, which can describe head-turning behaviors in response to dynamic stimuli during emotional events. We also propose a model for calculating crowd emotions and provide a method for representing crowd movements. Compared to existing researches, our method not only improves the perception model but also realizes the influence of perception on agents' emotions and movements. The results of comparative experiments show that the proposed method can effectively simulate audiovisual linkage phenomena in crowd evacuation during terrorist attacks. [Display omitted] • Propose AVL-based perception model considering visual, auditory, and the linkage between visual and auditory. • Realize the head-turning behavior of a escapee during terrorist attacks. • Propose emotion calculation model based on Durupinar theory. Combine with enhanced driving force model to show perception's impact on emotion and movement. • Validate security broadcasts' efficacy with proposed method. Explore the effect of location and number of security broadcasts on evacuation efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]