Crowd simulation in emergency aircraft evacuation using Virtual Reality

There has been considerable interest in crowd simulation and creating crowds of virtual humans that will move in a virtual environment in a believable way. This paper presents an experimental design for assessing human behavior in emergency evacuation of an aircraft among a team of players in a game set in a virtual environment. We present the sense of presence in a virtual environment as a possible way of validating human behavior and crowd simulation models. We are conducting a pilot experiment to explore crowd simulation in aircraft evacuation using Virtual Reality to achieve high levels of presence and thus could be used as a framework for validating crowd behavior simulations. We present two approaches for controlling crowd behavior. First by defining rules for computer simulated agents, second by providing controls to the users to navigate in the environment as autonomous agents and guiding other agents. Our contribution lies in our approach to combining these two approaches of behavior in order to simulate the crowd behavior in emergencies.