Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 147, March 2022, 105573
Safety Science

Development and evaluation of a VR research tool to study wayfinding behaviour in a multi-story building

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105573Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • A VR tool is designed to study wayfinding behaviour in a multi-story building.

  • Participants behaved different across wayfinding tasks with increasing complexity.

  • The validity and overall usability of the VR tool are evaluated and established.

Abstract

Although understanding wayfinding behaviour in complex buildings is important to ensure pedestrian safety, the state of the art predominantly investigated pedestrian movement in simplified environments. This paper presents a Virtual Reality tool – WayR, that is designed to investigate pedestrian wayfinding behaviour in a multi-story building under both normal and emergency situations. WayR supports free navigation and collects pedestrian walking trajectories, head movements and gaze points automatically. To evaluate WayR, a VR experiment consists of four wayfinding assignments were conducted. The validity and usability of WayR are evaluated using objective measures (i.e., route choice, evacuation exit choice, wayfinding performance, and observation behaviour) and subjective measures (i.e., realism, feeling of presence, system usability, and simulation sickness). Analysis of the objective measures indicates that participants’ wayfinding behaviour in VR matches with findings in the literature. Moreover, we found that overall participants behaved significantly different across wayfinding assignments with increasing complexity. Furthermore, the results of subjective measures indicate a high degree of realism, immersion, usability, and low level of sickness of WayR. Overall, the results demonstrated the face validity, content validity, construct validity and usability of WayR as a research tool to study wayfinding behaviour in a complex multi-story building.

Keywords

Virtual reality
Pedestrian wayfinding
Multi-story building
Evacuation
Validity
Route and exit choice

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