Development of Virtual Reality Simulation for Emergency Evacuation in Education

Abstract

Virtual Reality has recently developed as a prevalent technique adopting in numerous fields of scientific experiments. The thriving concept of simulating an interaction environment broadens the researchers’ competence to design the ideal virtual experimental conditions and manipulate the environment’s layouts sufficiently. The idea of practicing an emergency evacuation by a computer simulating model that reflects the physical environment analogously has been taken into account. This study aims to investigate whether the Virtual Reality simulation could be an optimal method for the emergency evacuation training, especially in the educational environment. Fifteen volunteers with no familiarity with the environment structure participated in this study, and experiments were plotted in two environments–the well-defined virtual environment for pretraining and the original physical environment for practical situation. The main hypothesis predicts that VR can effectively shorten the amount of time that pre-trained users spend to locate the emergency exits of a specific floor plan.