Impact of smoke control on caregivers' perception and behavioral responses during assisted evacuation at small-scale older people's welfare facilities: A non-interactive VR experiment with free navigation

Double body effect induced by integrating proprioceptive-vestibular and visual information.

Fire accidents occurred in underground metro train resulted in extensive loss of life and damage to property. In this study, an immersive virtual reality experiment was designed and conducted to investigate passengers’ evacuation performance inside the burning train carriage. The step-in-place technique was developed to make the player’s operation more convenient and realistic. A total of 126 participants conducted the VR experiment. Statistical analysis methods including normality test, Mann-Whiney U test, discrete choice model, and Tukey post-hoc tests were conducted. The results showed that people with real evacuation experience tended to evacuate longer than people without evacuation experience since past experience made them more flustered. People with real evacuation experience preferred to escape to adjacent carriage instead of staying in burning carriage. Female were more cautious while male were more risky due to different biological structures and social roles. Most people concerned more about safety than evacuation time. Previous evacuation education experience had no statistical significance on evacuation time, speed, and exit choice. The findings of the research could provide guidance for management staff to understand evacuation behavior and improve rescue performance.

Impact of tunnel lighting on traffic emissions based on VR experiment and car-following method

Evaluation and improvement of rail station name list signage on platform for direction by VR experiments with eye-tracker

Введение. В статье проведен всесторонний анализ понятия нейроэтики и доказана прямая зависимость развития нейромаркетинговых исследований от этикоправового регулирования данной области. Систематизированы и описаны проблемы этического и правового регулирования нейромаркетинговых исследований, а также предложены возможные пути их решения. Материалы и методы. В работе использованы методы сбора и обработки вторичной информации: библиографический анализ, метод традиционного (классического) анализа и формализованные методы – контент-анализ, информационно-целевой анализ. Результаты исследования. Сформирована хронологическая последовательность развития направлений нейромаркетинговых исследований: лабораторные исследования, полевые эксперименты, сбор данных с участием реальных покупателей, VR-эксперименты, использование нейрогаджетов и нейроинтерфейсов. Сформулированы ограничения, возникающие при реализации каждого из направлений. Отмечен факт нарастания ограничений в области этического и правового регулирования с переходом развития нейроисследований к каждому последующему уровню. Определены основные проблемы нейромаркетинговых исследований, лежащие в плоскости вопросов этики и права. Предложены возможные пути их решения. Изучен опыт зарубежных стран и доказан общемировой низкий уровень сформированности этико-правовой базы нейроисследований. Рассмотрены основные направления развития нормативных, регламентирующих и регулирующих актов в области изучаемой проблематики. Обсуждение и заключение. Теоретическая значимость данной работы заключается в систематизации проблем этикоправового регулирования нейромаркетинговых исследований. Практическая значимость выражена в формулировании рекомендаций по разработке направлений решения выявленных проблем. Сделанные обобщения и предложенные рекомендации важны для понимания и ускорения работы представителей научного и бизнес-сообществ в вопросах этико-правового регулирования в области нейромаркетинговых исследований. Introduction. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of the concept of neuroethics and proves the direct dependence of the development of neuromarketing research on the ethical and legal regulation of this field. The problems of ethical and legal regulation of neuromarketing research are systematized and described, as well as possible solutions are proposed. Materials and methods. The paper uses methods of collecting and processing secondary information: bibliographic analysis, the method of traditional (classical) analysis and formalized methods – content analysis, information and target analysis. Research results. A chronological sequence of the development of neuromarketing research directions has been formed: laboratory research, field experiments, data collection with the participation of real buyers, VR experiments, the use of neurogajets and neural interfaces. The limitations that arise in the implementation of each of the directions are formulated. The fact of organic growth in the field of ethical and legal regulation is noted with the transition of the development of neuroscience to each subsequent level. The main problems of neuromarketing research, which lie in the field of ethics and law, are identified. Possible solutions are proposed. The experience of foreign countries has been studied and the global low level of formation of the ethical and legal framework of neuroscience has been proved. The main directions of the development of normative, regulatory and regulatory acts in the field of the studied issues are considered. Discussion and conclusion. The theoretical significance of this work lies in the systematization of the problems of ethical and legal regulation of neuromarketing research. The practical significance is expressed in the formulation of recommendations for the development of ways to solve the identified problems. The generalizations made and the recommendations proposed are important for understanding and accelerating the work of representatives of the scientific and business communities on issues of ethical and legal regulation in the field of neuromarketing research.

Understanding crowd behavior is critical for designing buildings and public spaces with efficient circulation. However, the interplay of social and spatial contexts makes this endeavor challenging. This paper examines scenarios in which crowds perform a search task with time constraints, akin to individuals shopping or officers searching a crime area. We formulate and test two sets of hypotheses defined at the crowd and individual levels using desktop VR experiments. We conducted four experimental sessions that employed different social incentives (collaborative versus competitive) with a total of 140 participants, using a mixed factorial design where each individual participated in 12 trials. We found that competitive incentives produced higher levels of crowd aggregation than collaborative incentives. In addition, individuals were more likely to be influenced by others’ behaviors in the collaborative compared to the competitive condition. Notably, these social signals were conveyed among participants without any verbal communication. We also developed a novel graph theoretic measure, “search attractiveness,” that accurately predicts space occupation during a search task. This paper highlights the roles of social and spatial contexts in understanding occupation and aggregation.

Ecological validity of VR experiments for psychological and physiological responses to audio-visual environments

Modeling competing guidance on evacuation choices under time pressure using virtual reality and machine learning

Auditory perception experiments conducted in VR come along with a high degree of ecological validity while maintaining a controlled laboratory setting. However, since the participant's vision is occupied during simulation, conventional evaluation instruments like rating scales need to be relocated to the virtual environment to allow for immediate stimulus rating. This can be achieved either by the use of diegetic interfaces, which are implied to be a part of the simulation (e.g., a screen held by the participant's avatar) or non-diegetic interfaces, which do not claim to originate from the simulated reality (e.g., sliders and text elements laid on top of the participant's view). It is unknown whether the choice of interface does affect the participant's perception of the virtual environment - including its acoustic components. To address this shortcoming, a methodological study is presented. Participants are exposed to a virtual scenario simulating an urban green area with nearby ambience sound sources. In this setting, they are provided with diegetic and non-diegetic rating interfaces to assess the acoustic environment. Subsequently, perceived presence and involvement in the virtual environment are surveyed as well. This way, the study provides useful guidelines for future VR experiments assessing soundscape-related aspects of perception.

Affective stimuli in our environment indicate reward or threat and thereby relate to approach and avoidance behavior. Previous findings suggest that affective stimuli may bias visual perception, but it remains unclear whether similar biases exist in the auditory domain. Therefore, we asked whether affective auditory voices (angry vs. neutral) influence sound distance perception. Two VR experiments (data collection 2021-2022) were conducted in which auditory stimuli were presented via loudspeakers located at positions unknown to the participants. In the first experiment (N = 44), participants actively placed a visually presented virtual agent or virtual loudspeaker in an empty room at the perceived sound source location. In the second experiment (N = 32), participants were standing in front of several virtual agents or virtual loudspeakers and had to indicate the sound source by directing their gaze toward the perceived sound location. Results in both preregistered experiments consistently showed that participants estimated the location of angry voice stimuli at greater distances than the location of neutral voice stimuli. We discuss that neither emotional nor motivational biases can account for these results. Instead, distance estimates seem to rely on listeners' representations regarding the relationship between vocal affect and acoustic characteristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing the impact of passenger compliance behavior in CAVs on environmental benefits

Experiments as Code (ExaC) is a concept for reproducible, auditable, debuggable, reusable, & scalable experiments. Experiments are a crucial tool to understand Human-Building Interactions (HBI) and build a coherent theory around it. However, a common concern for experiments is their auditability and reproducibility. Experiments are usually designed, provisioned, managed, and analyzed by diverse teams of specialists (e.g., researchers, technicians, engineers) and may require many resources (e.g., cloud infrastructure, specialized equipment). Although researchers strive to document experiments accurately, this process is often lacking. Consequently, it is difficult to reproduce these experiments. Moreover, when it is necessary to create a similar experiment, the “wheel is very often reinvented”. It appears easier to start from scratch than trying to reuse existing work. Thus valuable embedded best practices and previous experiences are lost. In behavioral studies, such as in HBI, this has contributed to the reproducibility crisis. To tackle these challenges, we propose the ExaC paradigm, which not only documents the whole experiment, but additionally provides the automation code to provision, deploy, manage, and analyze the experiment. To this end, we define the ExaC concept, provide a taxonomy for the components of a practical implementation, and provide a proof of concept with an HBI desktop VR experiment that demonstrates the benefits of its “as code” representation, that is, reproducibility, auditability, debuggability, reusability, & scalability.

This study explores the effect of the experimenter’s gender/sex and its interaction with the participant’s gender/sex as potential contributors to the replicability crisis, particularly in the man-gendered domain of VR. 75 young men and women from Western France were randomly evaluated by either a man or a woman during a 13-min immersion in a first-person shooter game. Self-administered questionnaires were used to measure variables commonly assessed during VR experiments (sense of presence, cybersickness, video game experience, flow). MANOVAs, ANOVAs and post-hoc comparisons were used. Results indicate that men and women differ in their reports of cybersickness and video game experience when rated by men, whereas they report similar measures when rated by women. These findings are interpreted as consequences of the psychosocial stress triggered by the interaction between the two genders/sexes, as well as the gender conformity effect induced, particularly in women, by the presence of a man in a masculine domain. Corroborating this interpretation, the subjective measure of flow, which is not linked to video games and/or computers, does not seem to be affected by this experimental effect. Methodological precautions are highlighted, notably the brief systematic description of the experimenter, and future exploratory and confirmatory studies are outlined.Graphical abstract

New technologies have great potential to facilitate students' understanding and appreciation of one of the most abstract and challenging school subjects - physics. This study aimed to examine the effects of a game-based virtual reality teaching method on secondary school students' self-beliefs, interest, and performance in physics through a quasi-experimental design using pre- and post-test data. The evaluation is based on the systemic actiotope model that explains a person's goal-oriented actions by an interplay of their environment, action repertoire (i.e., students' performance and interest in physics), and subjective action space (i.e., students' self-efficacy, self-concept, and implicit theories regarding physics). A game-based virtual reality App to be used with Google cardboards was developed containing 10 teaching units from the secondary school physics class curriculum. Participants in the control group were taught using traditional teaching methods, while students in the experimental group went through the VR with the teacher and conducted the prepared VR experiments in addition to the traditionally presented content. Three tests measured students' physics performance during the semester. In addition, students answered questionnaires assessing their interest, self-efficacy, self-concept, and entity implicit theories regarding physics before and after the intervention, resulting in a Pretest-Posttest Control Group Design. There were no significant differences between the control and experimental group in test scores on the first and second tests but compared to the control group, the experimental group achieved higher scores on the third test. In addition, the results indicate differential effects of the game-based virtual reality teaching method on students' interest and self-efficacy regarding physics to the advantage of students identifying as male, but no effects on students' self-concept, and entity implicit theories regarding physics. The results of our pilot study suggest that incorporating innovative didactic methods into secondary school physics classes could potentially contribute to higher performance in and motivation for physics during this crucial period of adolescence when students develop educational and career aspirations. However, game-based virtual reality teaching methods seem to favor students identifying as male, which should be considered in their development and presentation. Other practical implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed.

The eye’s natural aging influences our ability to focus on close objects. Without optical correction, all adults will suffer from blurry close vision starting in their 40s. In effect, different optical corrections are necessary for near and far vision. Current state-of-the-art glasses offer a gradual change of correction across the field of view for any distance—using Progressive Addition Lenses (PALs). However, an inevitable side effect of PALs is geometric distortion, which causes the swim effect, a phenomenon of unstable perception of the environment leading to discomfort for many wearers. Unfortunately, little is known about the relationship between lens distortions and their perceptual effects, that is, between the complex physical distortions on the one hand and their subjective severity on the other. We show that perceived distortion can be measured as a psychophysical scaling function using a VR experiment with accurately simulated PAL distortions. Despite the multi-dimensional space of physical distortions, the measured perception is well represented as a 1D scaling function; distortions are perceived less with negative far correction, suggesting an advantage for short-sighted people. Beyond that, our results successfully demonstrate that psychophysical scaling with ordinal embedding methods can investigate complex perceptual phenomena like lens distortions that affect geometry, stereo, and motion perception. Our approach provides a new perspective on lens design based on modeling visual processing that could be applied beyond distortions. We anticipate that future PAL designs could be improved using our method to minimize subjectively discomforting distortions rather than merely optimizing physical parameters.

This paper introduces a methodology tailored to capture, post-process, and replicate audio-visual data of outdoor environments (urban or natural) for VR experiments carried out within a controlled laboratory environment. The methodology consists of 360∘\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^\\circ$$\\end{document} video and higher order ambisonic (HOA) field recordings and subsequent calibrated spatial sound reproduction with a spherical loudspeaker array and video played back via a head-mounted display using a game engine and a graphical user interface for a perceptual experimental questionnaire. Attention was given to the equalisation and calibration of the ambisonic microphone and to the design of different ambisonic decoders. A listening experiment was conducted to evaluate four different decoders (one 2D first-order ambisonic decoder and three 3D third-order decoders) by asking participants to rate the relative (perceived) realism of recorded outdoor soundscapes reproduced with these decoders. The results showed that the third-order decoders were ranked as more realistic.

A Clarity-intensity model for evacuation panic by fNIRS and VR

In visual environments, selective attention must be employed to focus on task-relevant stimuli. A key question here concerns the extent to which other stimuli within the visual field influence target processing. In this study, we ask whether face identity matching is subject to similar effects from irrelevant stimuli in the visual field, specifically task-irrelevant people. Although most previous studies rely on highly controlled face and body stimuli presented in isolation, here we use a more realistic environment. Participants take the role of passport officers and must match a person’s face to their photo-ID, while other people appear in the background, waiting to be processed. Presenting an interactive virtual environment on screen (Experiments 1 and 2) or in immersive VR (Experiment 3), we generally found no evidence for distraction from background people on face-matching accuracy. However, when immersed in VR, an angry crowd in the background delayed matching speed while not affecting accuracy. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results and their potential importance in practical settings.

Recently, many women in Korea are afraid of violent crimes and sex crimes in public toilets. The purpose of this study is to specifically and empirically identify the fear of crime factors that can be felt in public toilets. In this study, VR was implemented with actual public toilet elements in order to minimize the risk of actual crime exposure and time and cost problems that could be occurred through field experiences, and fear factors were derived through survey after VR experiment. As a result of this study, respondents were found to have fears about the location of the toilets, all-gender toilets, the brightness, maintenance, management of the public toilets, and specific fear of crime related to sex crimes were high. In addition, it was confirmed that the evaluation of each VR element showed differences depending on the level of fear felt by the individual. Through these results, we would like to provide implications such as the separation of men and women in public toilets, installing CCTV around the public toilets, and attaching notification statements related to emergency bells.