Virtual reality for indoor emergency evacuation studies: Design, development, and implementation review

Virtual reality plays a growing role in emergency behavior studies. This review focuses on the perspectives of research development and implementation. It synthesizes and discusses the identified studies from three interrelated fields, i.e., building and hazard simulation, game interaction, and data collection. Revealed features in existing literature help better understand the technical plans and practice. The variety of emergency types and research interests results in large-volume articles with different setups. Features simulated, data collected, and experiment processes differ across the reviewed articles. The study reveals that fire emergencies gained the most attention, while other hazards are less studied. Most research focuses on building design cues, with a growing number on social effects. Identified gaps and comments help guide future studies. Current game designs focus on cues rather than realism, and the population samples that participated in experiments are skewed. It is also vital to enhance game interaction and model reusability.