An immersive collaborative virtual environment of a university campus for performing virtual campus evacuation drills and tours for campus safety

Abstract

The use of a collaborative virtual reality environment for training and virtual tours has been increasingly recognized an as alternative to traditional reallife tours for university campuses. Our proposed application shows an immersive collaborative virtual reality environment for performing virtual online campus tours and evacuation drills using Oculus Rift head mounted displays. The immersive collaborative virtual reality environment also offers a unique way for training in emergencies for campus safety. The participant can enter the collaborative virtual reality environment setup on the cloud and participate in the evacuation drill or a tour 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 university campus environment among a set of players in an immersive virtual reality environment. We present three ways for controlling crowd behavior: by defining rules for computer simulated agents, by providing controls to the users to navigate in the VR environment as autonomous agents, and 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 methods of behavior in order to perform virtual evacuation drills and virtual tours in a multi-user virtual reality environment for a university campus. Results from this study can be used to measure the effectiveness of current safety, security, and evacuation procedure for campus safety.