Experimental Research On Pedestrian Exit Choice Based On Virtual Reality

The rapid economic development has accelerated the process of urbanization in China,and the continuous emergence of high-rise buildings has made the population more dense,making it harder to evacuate when fires happen.Therefore,the study of pedestrian evacuation and exit choice rules under fire is of great significance for the rational design of building exit facilities and guiding crowd evacuation.Considering the shortcomings of traditional research methods in achieving fire sce-narios and repeatability,we built a virtual reality experiment platform for pedestrian experiments using virtual reality technology.In order to study the effectiveness of vir-tual experiments and the advantages and disadvantages of different control methods in virtual scenes,we carried out real-world and virtual experiments under different control methods.In the experimental scenarios we set,the average difference of the trajectory of pedestrian movement in the real world and virtual scenarios is within 10cm,which shows that the pedestrian experiment based on the virtual reality experimental platform has certain effectiveness.In addition,as far as the process of the obstacle avoidance is concerned,the pedestrian trajectory under the mouse-mouse control method is closer to the real-world experiment.The results of the questionnaire show that the participants think that the control method using only the mouse is the best,and the control method using the combination of the headset and the mouse is the worst.In addition,we conducted pedestrian exit choice experiments based on this virtual experiment platform.In the single-room double-exit experiment,we found that as a whole,the proportion of participants choosing an exit with an expected shorter evac-uation time was about 60%,indicating that most participants can make a rational and optimal exit choice;Compared to flow preference,participants' preference for the exit with a small number of pedestrians is obvious.Therefore,when considering exit choice,the preference for participants' number of pedestrians cannot be ignored.By conduct-ing a multi-room exit choice experiment in an unfamiliar environment,we found that in a bilaterally symmetric environment,more than three-quarters of participants make random exit choices,but more than 70%of them chose the right side exit;When neigh-bors evacuate towards the same exit,more than half of the participants' exit choice were affected by the surrounding pedestrians;Herd behavior and avoidance behavior caused by social influences show a superposition effect;There is a critical value for the num-ber of surrounding pedestrians,when the number of people is below this threshold,the herd effect will prevail,and the number of people following the crowd is larger than the number of people avoiding the crowd;Conversely,the herd effect is less than the avoidance effect.The research results of this paper can provide a data basis for the pedestrian exit choice model,and also contribute to the design of evacuation facilities and the guidance of evacuation groups.