Do people follow the crowd in building emergency evacuation? A crosscultural immersive virtual realitybased study Abstract   This study aimed to examine the influence of crowd flow on human evacuation behavior during building fire emergencies, when evacuees perceive high uncertainty in the environment and experience mental stress. Evacuation experiments were conducted in an immersive virtual metro station, in which each participant was presented with one of three different patterns of crowd flow and asked to complete an evacuation task. The patterns of crowd flow were represented by nonplayer characters that split differently at each wayfinding decision point in the metro station. The experiments were conducted in Beijing, Los Angeles and London. The results showed that uneven splits of crowd flow motivated participants under mental stress to follow the majority of the crowd. This influence of crowd flow was generally consistent over the course of evacuation, and such consistency could be reinforced by stronger directional information conveyed by the crowd flow as well as positive feedback from the outcomes of previous wayfinding decisions. The results also indicated that the influence of crowd flow was significant in all three cultures represented by the three cities, however, the impact of culture on how participants would respond to the directional information conveyed by the crowd flow was insignificant.

Adaptive Crowd Control using Promotion Signage to Promote Smooth Evacuation Crowd control is one of the ways to prevent unexpected events at places where a large number of people gather. With technology developments, new evacuation systems are proposed in prevention planning. Recently, digital promotion signage has been used recently for promotion and advertising in public and commercial spheres. It is pointed that digital promotion signage attracts more attention than the traditional emergencyexit sign and the effect of the digital promotion signage to control human evacuation flow is verified by simulations. In this paper, we discuss a method that changes the contents of signage adaptively to the situations of congestion. This idea provides one solution for situations that many people are caught in the congestions and applying the idea to new application fields is also discussed.