A VR-based evacuation experience system considering crowd psychology during disasters

During disasters, panic, driven by crowd psychology, can induce irrational behavior among evacuees, potentially leading to severe secondary disasters. However, conventional evacuation drills often fail to replicate the influence of such dynamic crowd psychology. Therefore, this study aims to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) evacuation system that simulates crowd psychology, including conformity bias, thereby allowing evacuees to experience panic situations. In the proposed system, to simulate evacuees entering a panicked state due to crowd psychology, we constructed a Non-Player Character (NPC) evacuation behavior model applying the Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles (RVO) algorithm and Boids theory. This model autonomously selects evacuation routes based on the flow direction of the surrounding crowd and the agent’s own psychological state. Simulation results confirmed that introducing NPCs running at the front of the crowd toward incorrect evacuation routes reproduced crowd-wide misguidance caused by conformity bias. The results also showed that the placement of calm NPCs significantly affects the success of the group's evacuation. This system enables the experience of irrational behaviors caused by crowd psychology, which was previously difficult to achieve, contributing to the realization of more practical evacuation training.