Studying the impact of lighting on the pedestrian route choice using Virtual Reality

Efficient crowd management is essential for optimizing the performance of pedestrian infrastructures, either in terms of crowd flow or pedestrian levels of safety and comfort. This study investigates the impact of one type of crowd management measure, namely lighting, on pedestrian behavior. Using Virtual Reality experiments, the impact of...

Comparison of pedestrian wayfinding behavior between a real and a virtual multi-story building: A validation study

Although numerous studies used Virtual Reality (VR) to study pedestrian behavior, there is an ongoing debate about the validity of using VR for studying pedestrian behavior. This study aims to contribute toward the validation of immersive VR systems for pedestrian wayfinding behavior studies by conducting a direct comparison of a field...

Wayfinding behaviour in a multi-level building: A comparative study of HMD VR and Desktop VR

Virtual Reality (VR) provides the possibility to study pedestrian wayfinding behaviour in multi-level buildings. Although VR has been applied increasingly to study pedestrian behaviour, it has remained unclear how different VR technology would affect behavioural outcomes in a multi-level building. The study compares the adoption of different VR...

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

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...

Using virtual reality to study pedestrian exit choice behaviour during evacuations

Exit choice is vital to pedestrians’ survival during evacuations. This paper presents the results of a VR experiment and a field experiment to study pedestrian exit choice behaviour during evacuations. Primarily, we compared pedestrian exit choice behaviour with a VR experiment and a field experiment to determine the ecological validity of a...