STUDY ON THE INFLUENCE OF SMOKE AND EXIT SIGNS ON FIRE EVACUATION - ANALYSIS OF EVACUATION EXPERIMENTS IN A REAL AND VIRTUAL HOTEL

摘要

Human behaviour in fires is mainly studied by incident evaluations and real-life experiments,such as unannounced evacuation drills. The possibilities of virtual reality for studying humanbehaviour in fires are so far hardly adopted by researchers. Nevertheless, the application of abehavioural assessment and research tool (BART) in virtual reality is expected to be a valuablesupplement on the existing research methods. The innovative instrument will be validated bycomparing the results of experiments in a virtual environment with results of the same experiments inreal life. In this paper some results of case studies on evacuation behaviour in a real hotel building, aswell as in a virtual hotel building in BART are given. The participants' route choice, movement timeand evacuation behaviour are part of the analysis in the paper.