INVESTIGATION OF LEADING EVACUEES USING VR

Abstract

Evacuation is an adequate effective and feasible measures to avoid the disaster risks. However, many people do not conform the evacuation orders and fail to evacuate. This is possible since they are affected by “normalcy bias” which restrain the people from recognizing the dangerous situations. The leading evacuees has been proposed by Katada (2006) for mitigating normalcy bias and promoting people to evacuate. The leading evacuees play a predetermined role for initiating the evacuation at high risk of disasters and suggesting the evacuation to the neighbors. This paper investigated the effect of leading evacuee on an evacuation decision by implementing virtual reality (VR) to the people. The subjects were asked to make an evacuation decision under high flood risk situation with and without leading evacuees. We then recorded evacuation timing from VR and interviewed their attitudes and experiences for flood disasters. The results revealed that leading evacuees promote sooner evacuation with statistical significance. Moreover, it confirms that the leading evacuees encourage people to evacuate at the same time as the river could be seen.