Immersive virtual reality environment of a subway evacuation on a cloud for disaster preparedness and response training

Virtual Reality (VR) based training and evacuation drills in disaster preparedness has been increasingly recognized as an alternative to traditional real-life drills and table-top exercises. Immersive collaborative VR evacuation drills offer a unique way for training in emergencies. The participants can enter the collaborative VR environment setup on the cloud and participate in the evacuation drill which leads to considerable cost advantages over large-scale real-life exercises. This paper presents an experimental design approach to gather data on human behavior and emergency response in a subway environment among a set of players in an immersive virtual reality environment. Our proposed multi-user VR-based training subway environment offers flexibility to run multiple scenarios and evacuation drills for disaster preparedness and response. We present three ways for controlling crowd behavior. First by defining rules for computer simulated agents, second by providing controls to the users to navigate in the VR environment as autonomous agents and the third by providing controls to the users with a keyboard/joystick along with an immersive VR head set in real time. Our contribution lies in our approach to combine these three approaches of behavior in order to simulate the crowd behavior in emergencies.