Characterization and future perspectives of Virtual Reality Evacuation Drills for safe built environments: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Physical evacuation drills are pre-planned activities to train building occupants in facing emergencies and evaluate safety performances. Nowadays, technologies including Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) are shifting from the physical to the virtual paradigm. AR enables just to extend real-world environment, while VR and IVR allow to (re)create and manipulate digital environments. VR and IVR simulation systems have been observed to guarantee higher involvement and long-term information retention — leveraging more attractive experiences and psychological arousal. However, efforts should be provided to improve end-user training while assessing occupants’ behaviors and the effectiveness of the emergency plan. This paper proposes a systematic literature review of VR and IVR evacuation solutions. To support and guide such effort, we formulated thirteen structured research questions investigating scenarios, recipients, requirements, objectives, methods, and technologies. The results mainly show that VR and IVR drills almost entirely tackle a single hazard, considers occupants as sole system recipients, and lack systems formalization. Among the most relevant outcomes, the paper analyzes the need for enhancing the modeling of emergency systems (e.g., signage, alarms), user inclusiveness (i.e., impaired individuals), devices, non-player characters, and additional effects (e.g., heat reproduction, sounds, and smells). These measures can improve the level of realism experienced by the user of IVR simulators and pave the way to more reliable outcomes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.