Using virtual reality to explore the effect of multimodal alarms on human emergency evacuation behaviors

Abstract This study seeks to employ virtual reality (VR) to simulate augmented reality (AR) smart glasses to assess the influence of multimodal alarm design on human evacuation behavior during emergencies. Multimodality is regarded as a beneficial enhancement for future alarm systems due to its potential to enhance the visibility and effectiveness of alarms through various features, including auditory, visual, and olfactory elements. To this end, we developed and integrated additional human voice, visual, and olfactory reminder modalities based on the ISO T3 alarm, resulting in three distinctive multimodal alarm solutions: (i) a solution featuring a human voice prompt module, (ii) a solution incorporating both a human voice and a visual prompt module, and (iii) a solution that combines human voice, visual, and olfactory prompt modules. The study created a virtual airport scenario, simulating an event where participants waited for their luggage while wearing AR smart glasses. During this simulation, after the alarm was activated, the non-player characters in the airport stayed put and did not evacuate. Ninety-six individuals participated in the study, and the findings indicated that the multimodal alarm design significantly impacted participants' "decided" and "undecided" evacuation behaviors and time. The results suggest that integrating audio and visual modalities into ISO safety alarms could enhance emergency evacuation efficiency in complex environments, and the olfactory information cue has the potential to enhance individuals' sense of urgency when making evacuation decisions. This research confirms the importance of multimodality in improving evacuation effectiveness and offers insights for designing next-generation building safety alarms.