Assessment of People's Perception of Fire Growth: A Virtual Reality Study

Abstract: One important aspect that is considered when designing safer buildings is human behavior. A comprehensive assessment of how people react during a fire, provides engineers valuable information, which will allow them to develop effective solutions to help people reach a safe place under tenable conditions. When evacuating a building, a key factor is pre-evacuation time, this is the lapse of time that starts when the person is alerted of a fire cue and ends once they evaluate the situation, before reacting and starting the purposive movement towards a safe place. Pre-evacuation times are associated with fire risk perception. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate how people perceive fire growth risk in a fire scenario represented in virtual reality when compared to other methods, such as educational videos. The experiments included fifty-five test participants who were immersed in a virtual environment, where they had to predict the evolution of a fire and estimate if they could extinguish it with the help of a portable fire extinguisher. The results obtained showed that 97% of participants could not accurately estimate fire growth. Only 3% of people estimated a time difference that corresponded to the real time difference. In addition, there was a significant variation on the results (under/overestimation). A slightly higher number of responses underestimated the fire growth, this was observed in 56 out of the 104 incorrect responses. Finally, it was possible to derive that at later stages of fires people will not try to use a portable fire extinguisher.