Evacuation Guidance Design: An Experimental Study Based on Eye Tracking Devices

It is a crucial issue whether evacuees follow the evacuation guidance during evacuation. Good evacuation guidance is necessary to be designed to help the evacuees follow the guidance. In this paper, evacuation experiments based on wearable eye tracking devices were carried out to study the design effect of the evacuation guidance. Three factors were considered in these experiments: 1) the position of the evacuation guidance; 2) follow guidance or follow other evacuees; 3) follow a stranger or a familiar person. The results show that more participants noticed the guidance with low position and ground position than the guidance with up position. The evacuees intend to follow others rather than to follow the guidance, i.e. most evacuees act as “follower”. Eye tracking evacuation experiments can also be used to test the effectiveness of evacuation guidance signs.