Crowd Behaviour during High-Stress Evacuations in an Immersive Virtual Environment

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that immersive virtual environments can effectively simulate real crowd behaviors during high-stress evacuations, providing a safe and ethical platform for research into crowd dynamics and disaster prevention.

Contribution

The paper introduces the use of shared 3D virtual environments for conducting realistic crowd experiments with human subjects, capturing behaviors like herding and overcrowding during emergencies.

Findings

Crowd behaviors in virtual environments mirror real-life patterns.

High-stress virtual evacuations induce herding and overcrowding.

Herding emerges from density effects without imitation tendency increases.

Abstract

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 ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared 3D virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive 3D virtual environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd disasters. We describe the behavioral mechanisms at play under such extreme conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur. Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour in high-risk situations with real human subjects.