The Heat is On: Exploring User Behaviour in a Multisensory Virtual Environment for Fire Evacuation

This blog post provides a brief summary of a paper authored by Emily Shaw, Tessa Roper, Tommy Nilsson, Glyn Lawson, Sue Cobb and Daniel Miller. A full presentation will be given during the 2019 CHI conference on Wednesday 8th May, at 09:00 AM in the Dochart 1 room.

The multisensory VR system.

Context
Urban fire represents one of the leading causes of death and property damage, regularly inflicting massive costs to the economy. Against the backdrop of recent high-profile incidents, it seems hardly surprising that interest in novel life-saving technologies and training methods is now on the rise. Our novel training system provides realistic multi-sensory simulation of fire scenarios and can be used to explore how people react when a fire breaks out.

Towards a Multi-Sensory Experience
Immersive virtual reality (VR) might seem like an ideal solution as it allows people to learn correct safety procedures in simulated situations that would otherwise be too hazardous to re-enact in the real life. Previous use of VR in fire safety training has however attracted criticism for lacking sufficient realism; in particular the sensory feedback normally present in a real world context, such as heat or smoke scent. Our system addresses this limitation.

A scent diffuser (left) and IR heaters (right) constitute a centerpiece of our system.

We have developed a prototype VR system capable of delivering not just audiovisual feedback, but also real-time heat and scent stimulation. Using a simulated fire in an office building scenario, we ran a study to compare participant evacuation behaviour when presented with multi-sensory feedback with those who received audiovisual feedback only.

An overview of our system setup

Study findings
Quantitative and qualitative analyses of participant attitudes and behaviours provided us with a clear indication that the perceived realism of VR simulations can indeed be increased through the addition of thermal and olfactory interfaces. This was demonstrated in a number of distinct ways, including:

• Participants experiencing the multi-sensory version of the virtual fire evacuation reported a higher level of perceived urgency and time pressure.
• The introduction of multisensory stimulation caused participants to behave more carefully, skirting the walls around fires, rather than traversing rooms directly.
• The majority of participants experiencing the audiovisual version of the fire evacuation referred to the experience as a ‘game’. The occurrence of similar game-like attitudes was considerably lower amongst participants of the multi-sensory evacuation scenario.

We hope that these findings will inspire and provoke other researchers into further exploration of the potential offered by novel technology in improving fire safety training methods. At the same time, we are also confident that the benefits of multimodality demonstrated during our study are relevant beyond the context of fire safety training. We thus hope that future work in this domain will help inform the design of interfaces in a wider range of both novel and existing contexts.

On top of presenting our paper, we will likewise be demoing our multisensory fire evacuation system starting 4:30 PM on Monday and during the morning and afternoon coffee breaks until Thursday morning. Ready for some heat? Come and try out the system for yourself!