Observing Evacuation Behaviours of Surprised Participants in Virtual Reality Earthquake Simulator

Abstract

Evacuation training should be more realistic. We aim to develop a VR-based evacuation training system that includes gaming elements but completely separates evacuation training and game. In addition, the training system should simulate earthquakes that suddenly occur. Before starting the development, we got interest ed in observing the evacuation behaviours of participants in a VR earthquake simulator. Thus, we conducted a preliminary comparative experiment that examined the differences between one-participant and two-participant settings in the simulator. As a result, participants tended to keep moving in the one-participant setting and consequently completed evacuation faster. However, participants tended to have more discussion and synchronisation in the two-participant setting, resulting in a slower evacuation. These findings have the potential to be beneficial to development.