Serious games for the Elicitation of way-finding behaviours in emergency situations

Abstract

Understanding human behaviour in emergency evacuation from buildings is of utmost importance for fire safety designers, architects and engineers as they elaborate on strategies to improve the emergency paths to exits. This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting a room of an unknown building. This test is part of a methodological approach that aims at the creation of a framework coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrians and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). A population sample of 22 subjects was used to test such a methodological approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on, in playing a Serious Game. The game environment presents the same scenarios shown in the questionnaire using more elaborated 3D rendering to provide players with a sense of realism. The game was developed under the Unity3D game engine and based on the Serious Games concept. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signalling.

Serious games for the human behaviour analysis in emergency evacuation scenarios

“…Mean age was 35 years (SD = 14.6; min age = 14; max age = 55; 13 males; 9 females). Results were already published [86,91]. These results can be seen in Table 1.…”

“…The elicitation of human behaviour in such situations will help stakeholders and planners forecast potentially dangerous situations and prepare the appropriate preventive actions [86].…”

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“…E no quinto cenário, é apresentada informação contraditória: a seta indica que a fuga deve ser pela esquerda, mas há pessoas a fugir no sentido contrário ( fig.5e). O dilema que se coloca ao jogador é se deve seguir as indicações da sinalética ou as pessoas que fogem no sentido oposto [17,18].…”

A VR-based user study on the effects of vision impairments on recognition distances of escape-route signs in buildings

“…Since the severity of the symptoms of people with vision impairments differs, finding 1 In our VR-based user study, participants indicate from which distance they can recognize escape-route signs. Top left: a simulated wheelchair reduces motion sickness.…”

“…In our work, we designed our experiments according to the setup proposed by Xie et al [33], but as a VR simulation with simulated vision impairments. Based on the concept of serious games, Almeida et al [1] used Unity3D [26] to develop a game for conducting experiments on eliciting human behavior in emergency situations. The authors claim that their game gives a sense of realism due to elaborated 3D renderings.…”