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Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment

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 demon...

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Autores principales: Moussaïd, Mehdi, Kapadia, Mubbasir, Thrash, Tyler, Sumner, Robert W., Gross, Markus, Helbing, Dirk, Hölscher, Christoph
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5046946/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27605166
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2016.0414
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author Moussaïd, Mehdi
Kapadia, Mubbasir
Thrash, Tyler
Sumner, Robert W.
Gross, Markus
Helbing, Dirk
Hölscher, Christoph
author_facet Moussaïd, Mehdi
Kapadia, Mubbasir
Thrash, Tyler
Sumner, Robert W.
Gross, Markus
Helbing, Dirk
Hölscher, Christoph
author_sort Moussaïd, Mehdi
collection PubMed
description 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 three-dimensional 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 three-dimensional 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 behavioural 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.
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spelling pubmed-50469462016-10-06 Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment Moussaïd, Mehdi Kapadia, Mubbasir Thrash, Tyler Sumner, Robert W. Gross, Markus Helbing, Dirk Hölscher, Christoph J R Soc Interface Life Sciences–Engineering interface 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 three-dimensional 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 three-dimensional 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 behavioural 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. The Royal Society 2016-09 /pmc/articles/PMC5046946/ /pubmed/27605166 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2016.0414 Text en © 2016 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Life Sciences–Engineering interface
Moussaïd, Mehdi
Kapadia, Mubbasir
Thrash, Tyler
Sumner, Robert W.
Gross, Markus
Helbing, Dirk
Hölscher, Christoph
Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title_full Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title_fullStr Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title_full_unstemmed Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title_short Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
title_sort crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment
topic Life Sciences–Engineering interface
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5046946/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27605166
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2016.0414
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