Comparing Three Stimulus Presentation Types in a Virtual Reality Experiment to Human Wayfinding Behavior During Emergency Situation

Abstract

Understanding and predicting people’s displacement movement is particularly important for professionals involved in planning complex buildings (e.g., hospitals, convention centers, subway stations and university campus). An interesting approach to consider when studying human wayfinding behavior within buildings, namely considering the detection of visual stimuli, is the use of psychophysics methods. This paper aims to discuss the use of stimulus presentation comparing three methodological approaches. Three types of stimulus presentation with an increasing increment of visual information and interaction were considered: (i) constant stimuli method with fixed images, (ii) constant stimuli method with movies, and (iii) virtual reality simulation of a real environment. For this, the results of three studies were analyzed in order to verify the existence of agreement between users’ route-choices. Findings suggest, as expected, that increasing the visual information and interaction level also increase the results dispersion.