Examining the effects of sequential polyhedron visibility on wayfinding and evacuation an online experiment in virtual reality environment

Abstract

The paper presents the understanding the basics of the human wayfinding process that can be substantially illuminated by the correlations between space-syntactic variables and kinesthetic data of individuals roaming in a spatio-temporal environment. However, two-dimensional syntactic concepts offer a perception of place to some extent, they may neglect to capture the volumetric effects of space on human perception, especially during movement. Therefore, besides 2D syntactic variables, this paper essentially focuses on polyhedrons as 3D isovists to explore the impacts of the sequential volumetric visibility data on human behavior in terms of the spatial decision-making process in the wayfinding and evacuation issues. In this framework, the article discusses the results of a series of wayfinding and evacuation experiments implemented in a virtual building environment consisting of randomly arranged and dimensioned circulation areas. While evacuation experiments contained legal egress signages at properly designated doors and spots, wayfinding experiments had no signboards. On the other hand, the 3D building model is designed with a couple of architectural modeling software and transferred into a simulation environment. The experiments are conducted with forty four (44) respondents over an online meeting platform. Then, the respondents' trajectories and kinesthetic data are retrieved from the experiments, and the correlations between behavioral and syntactic data are investigated. The primary findings demonstrated that participants in the regular exit group tended to be around the zones with higher integration values. In contrast, the signages and volumetric visibility data are highly influential on the emergency exit group when evacuating the building.