António Leça Coelho

Towards A Serious Games Evacuation Simulator.

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants.

Preliminary experiments with EVA - Serious Games virtual fire drill simulator

Fire keeps claiming a large number of victims in building fires. Although there are ways to minimize such events, fire drills are used to train the building occupants for emergency situations. However, organizing and implement these exercises is a complex task, and sometimes not sucessfull. Furthermore, fire drills require the mobilization of some finantial resources and time, and affect the normal functioning of the site where they occur. To overcome the aforementioned issues, computer games have a set of features that might overcome this problem. They offer engagement to their players, keeping them focused, and providing training to real life situations. The game evaluate users, providing them some feedback, making possible for the players to improve their performance. The proposed methodology aims to study the viability of using a game that recreates a fire drill in a 3D environment using Serious Games. The information acquired through the player’s performance is very valuable and will be later used to implement an artificial population. A sample of 20 subjects was selected to test the application. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the exercise had a positive impact on users. Moreover, the data acquired is of great important and will be later used to demonstrate the possibility of creating an artificial population based on human behaviour.

Serious games for the Elicitation of way-finding behaviours in emergency situations

Understanding human behaviour in emergency evacuation from buildings is of utmost importance for fire safety designers, architects and engineers as they elaborate on strategies to improve the emergency paths to exits. This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting a room of an unknown building. This test is part of a methodological approach that aims at the creation of a framework coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrians and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). A population sample of 22 subjects was used to test such a methodological approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on, in playing a Serious Game. The game environment presents the same scenarios shown in the questionnaire using more elaborated 3D rendering to provide players with a sense of realism. The game was developed under the Unity3D game engine and based on the Serious Games concept. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signalling.

Serious games for the human behaviour analysis in emergency evacuation scenarios

This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting an unknown building. This work is part of a larger effort to devise the methodological approach underlying the implementation of simulation of pedestrians and elicitation of their emergent dynamics, an experimental framework coined SPEED. To validate our experimental setup, a group of 16 experts on fire safety, emergency planning and building evacuation were consulted. The experts were solicited to answer a questionnaire, rating their gaming experiences and validating the questions in the form to be presented to subjects. Their comments were valuable inputs used in the development of the experiment described in this paper. A sample of 62 subjects was then used to test our approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on playing a Serious Game resorting to the Unity3D game engine. Some specific scenarios were carefully designed and presented to subjects, both in the questionnaire and in the game environment to maintain consistency of answers. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signage.

Using Serious Games to Train Children and Elicit Fire Safety Behaviour.

Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, contrary to the traditional entertainment purpose. One of their application domains is fire safety. Possible injuries from fires are a dangerous safety concern for children, for instance. Another important issue is the elicitation of behavioural knowledge to design and feed simulation models. The lack of human behaviour data is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulation designers. This paper addresses the aforementioned matters in respect to: i) acquiring valuable knowledge on children behaviour when facing the urgent need for evacuation; and ii) devising an educational tool. A group of 19 children from an elementary school played two different role plays using a Serious Game and the data of their behaviours was collected. Results were analysed and are here presented. Future work is two-fold: to expand and to refine data collection to other groups such as elderly; to use this data for crowd synthesis particularly for evacuation simulators.

Elderly and fire safety: using serious games to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios

The problem of leaving a building while facing some emergency has gained much attention from the scientific community. Evacuation simulators can help emergency planners to assess the safety of buildings. However, such simulators still lack behavioural knowledge to increase their accuracy. The elderly have specific behaviour idiosyncrasies. This paper presents a set of experiments designed to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios using serious games, applied to a population sample of 20 adults aged over 65 years. They were presented three experiments (alarm id, exit-choice in five different situations and auditorium with four situations) and their reactions were collected. Results were analysed and compared with previous similar experiments. Future directions in this research include: to expand and to refine data collection to other scenarios and perform massive data collection using the internet; and to use this data to feed and enhance existing crowd simulators particularly for evacuation purposes.