Related papers: The Heat is On: Exploring User Behaviour in a Mult…
Virtual environments (VEs) offer potential benefits to health and safety training: exposure to dangerous (virtual) environments; the opportunity for experiential learning; and a high level of control over the training, in that aspects can…
Virtual reality allows creating highly immersive visual and auditory experiences, making users feel physically present in the environment. This makes it an ideal platform to simulate dangerous scenarios, including fire evacuation, and study…
Virtual environments (VEs) are making their way into various sectors of life to enhance and support human activity, including learning. VEs have been used in various contexts for training, and in many cases they are designed to model or…
This paper presents a pilot study exploring the effects of an olfactory stimulus (smoke) for a Virtual Reality game designed to support wildfire evacuation preparedness. Participants (N=18) were split evenly into either a smoke or a control…
In the event of a fire emergency in the built environment, occupants face a range of evacuation decisions, including the choice of exits. An important question from the standpoint of evacuation safety is how evacuees make these choices and…
This paper describes our recent effort to use virtual reality to simulate threatening emergency evacuation scenarios in which a robot guides a person to an exit. Our prior work has demonstrated that people will follow a robot's guidance,…
Forest bathing is a nature immersion practice that reduces stress, restores mental resources, and has a wide variety of use cases in the treatment of mental illnesses. Since many people who need the benefits of forest bathing have little…
The risk of loss of lives and property damage has increased all around the world in recent years as wildfire seasons have become longer and fires have become larger. Knowing how to prepare and evacuate safely is critical, yet it may be…
Understanding thermal regulation and subjective perception of temperature is crucial for improving thermal comfort and human energy consumption in times of global warming. Previous work shows that an environment's color temperature affects…
Fire emergencies can happen without warning and knowing how to respond quickly can save lives Unfortunately traditional fire drills can be disruptive costly and often fail to recreate the pressure of a real emergency This project introduces…
Thermal feedback is critical to a range of Virtual Reality (VR) applications, such as firefighting training or thermal comfort simulation. Previous studies showed that adding congruent thermal feedback positively influences User eXperience…
Humans make their evacuation decisions first at strategic/tactical levels, deciding their exit and route choice and then at operational level, navigating to a way-point, avoiding collisions. What influences an individuals at tactical level…
VEs are typically limited to visual and auditory cues; however, recent results show that multiple sensory modalities increase the immersion. In this study, an experimental protocol is proposed to recreate multiple tactile, in particular…
Incorporating multi-sensory cues into Virtual Reality (VR) can significantly enhance user experiences, mirroring the multi-sensory interactions we encounter in the real-world. Olfaction plays a crucial role in shaping impressions when…
Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly being used as a research platform for investigating human responses to environmental variables. While VR provides tremendous advantages in terms of variable isolation and manipulation, and ease of…
Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to…
Virtual Environments (VEs) provide the opportunity to simulate a wide range of applications, from training to entertainment, in a safe and controlled manner. For applications which require realistic representations of real world…
Timely and adequate risk communication before natural hazards can reduce losses from extreme weather events and provide more resilient disaster preparedness. However, existing natural hazard risk communications have been abstract,…
Navigating spaces is an embodied experience. Examples can vary from rescue workers trying to save people from natural disasters; a tourist finding their way to the nearest coffee shop, or a gamer solving a maze. Virtual reality allows these…
Fire keeps claiming a large number of victims in building fires. Although there are ways to minimize such events, fire drills are used to train the building occupants for emergency situations. However, organizing and implement these…