Follower behavior under stress in immersive VR
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Follower behavior under stress in immersive VR Alejandro Ríos1 · Nuria Pelechano1 Received: 13 June 2019 / Accepted: 22 February 2020 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Crowd following · Immersive VR · Studies of human behavior
1 Introduction Crowd simulation models can have a big impact on the overall believability of a populated environment. Given the variety of applications, such as video games, movies or training, it is important to tailor the behavior of the crowd to the particular simulation. In order to simulate realistically different types of crowds and behaviors, it is essential to first study how humans behave in such scenarios. Complex simulations such as emergencies, fire situations or evacuations are expensive and difficult to implement in the real world, thus virtual environments can be used instead. VE are often populated with a crowd to increase the level of presence (Pelechano et al. 2008), and this leads to participants behaving as they would do in the real world. This fact has led many research groups to study human behavior in virtual reality environments (Olivier et al. 2014).
* Alejandro Ríos [email protected] Nuria Pelechano [email protected] 1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Most of the work dealing with immersive crowds has focused on studying low-level reactive behavior (e.g., collision avoidance); however, there has been little work studying higher-level decision making in such environments. In order to develop more accurate pedestrian evacuation models, it is necessary to study human behavior under these circumstances, and to find the relationships between individuals’ personalities and their behavior. By doing so, we could achieve human models that
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