Evacuation Simulation

This project presents evacuation simulation of a school building using virtual reality. It is well known that crowd stampede is one of the most disastrous forms of collective behavior caused due to panic. It leads to fatalities as people get trampled and crushed as they fall. The application presents a school building environment with several classrooms with students, teachers, chairs, televisions, walls, doors and tables.This simulation aims to aid the visitors in navigation within the building.

View of class room in the buidling during evacuation	View of an avatar visualizing the video for exit routes.

Quick evacuation of occupants in a building is very critical to save lives. Training of occupants in a real-time environment is very complex because it is both expensive and dangerous. It is well known that crowd stampede is one of the most disastrous forms of collective behavior that is caused due to panic. It leads to fatalities as people get trampled and crushed as they fall. The evacuation simulation in Virtual Reality demonstrates how people behave in emergency scenarios which they may not be able to experience in a real world.

Embedded Videos

Embedded video with a virtual environment can be used to show multiple views for an evacuation visualization task.Embedded video visualizations integrate video and 3D model data to help users understand complex situations. Fig. 5show an agent visualizing the embedded video for exit routes inside the building during evacuation. When evacuating the building, the user relies more on the embedded videos. We plan to further explore several designs from the video processing dimension and the navigation dimension as well in our future work.

View of an avatar visualizing the embedded video during evacuation

The goal of our work is to not only to find visualization designs that will prove the effectiveness of using embedded videos in 3D environment, but also to develop general guidelines or theory that will help visualization designers to integrate embedded videos with virtual environment for emergency evacuation. We follow a user based research approach where we involve user at every step.

Modeling

The first stage in the creation of application involves modeling the virtual environment. We have modeled the library using 3ds Max and Form Z software’s.

3D Max View	Plan view of evacuation

VRML

The second stage in the creation of the application involves converting the 3D studio file to VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) file. The 3D model of the building modeled in 3D Max was exported to a VRML file.

Lobby view in VRML	Lobby view in VRML

Publications

• Sharma, S., Vadali, H., “Simulation and Modeling of a Virtual Library for Navigation and Evacuation”, MSV'08 - The 2008 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Methods, Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, July 14-17, 2008
• Sharma, S., Vadali, H., “Fuzzy Logic Application for Emergency Evacuation in a Virtual Environment”, Proceedings of World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, WMSCI-2006, Orlando, USA, July, 2008 (accepted)

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