Guidance effectiveness of combined crowd-control media

Optimizing crowd control requires understanding the effectiveness of media that convey guidance information. Although the guidance effectiveness of individual media has been mainly focused, limited attention has been paid to the combined use of these media. In this study, we conducted a nonimmersive virtual reality (VR) experiment. We presented 162 VR scenes in a virtual Y-junction to 55 participants and investigated their route selection preferences. Each VR scene had different patterns of route conditions (travel times and numbers of pedestrians) and crowd-control media. We considered signage, handheld sign, and announcement for single crowd-control media, and signageand-handheld-sign and signage-and-announcement combinations to investigate the guidance effectiveness of combined media. The experimental results indicated that these combined media increased the odds of compliance rate by approximately 23 and 49 times, respectively; both combinations proved more effective than using each medium individually. These results will be useful in designing crowd-control measures.