ASSIGNMENT
Building fires pose a significant threat to public safety, with 1 in 60 buildings affected annually in the Netherlands. Efficiently guiding people to exits during a fire emergency is crucial, yet several factors, such as acute stress, environmental unfamiliarity, and problematic crowd dynamics, can lead to potentially fatal navigation errors. Current solutions often fall short due to numerous distractors, a lack of adaptability, and failure to address individual needs. This project aims to start the process from lab-to-life and further develop and test an individualised, adaptive navigation system using Virtual Reality (VR) and digital twins of university buildings that are known to cause confusion to enhance fire safety and emergency response. The proposed system could, in the future both be used by both victims trying to escape a building as well as firefighters trying to locate the fire source or people in need of assistance. Navigation is challenging in modern buildings, as interior complexity and crowd size increase
Specifically, in this project, we will test the effectiveness of certain navigational helps (i.e., multimodal or unimodal signals via handheld devices) on navigational success as well as physiological (e.g., assessed via heart-rate measurements) and subjective measures of arousal. Depending on the specific research question, we may also change the virtual environment to reflect an indoor fire (e.g., adding smoke to the VR environment).
Depending on the study outcome and setup, there is an opportunity to publish this research in an international peer-reviewed journal.
This project will have you work in a larger research team comprised of multiple students across different faculties, as well as researchers and the BMS lab.
KEYWORDS
Fire, public safety, virtual reality.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ORGANIZATION
The section Psychology of Conflict, Risk and Safety at the University of Twente has a distinctive and unique profile in the areas of risk perception and risk communication, conflict and crisis management and the antecedents of risky, antisocial and criminal behaviour. It currently includes 16 research staff members and 8 PhD students. We work from both a psychology and an engineering perspective and cooperate with other scientific disciplines, based on the “high tech, human touch” profile of the University of Twente.
AVAILABILITY
Flexible. This internship is a highly recommended (!) precursor for the master's project on the same topic. This internship is open to 1 student.
INTERESTED?
Please contact the internship coordinator Miriam Oostinga (m.s.d.oostinga@utwente.nl).
LITERATURE
- Arning, K., Ziefle, M., Li, M., & Kobbelt, L. (2012, December). Insights into user experiences and acceptance of mobile indoor navigation devices. In Proceedings of the 11th international conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (pp. 1-10).
- Large, D. R., & Burnett, G. E. (2014). The effect of different navigation voices on trust and attention while using in-vehicle navigation systems. Journal of safety research, 49, 69-e1.
- Johanson, C., Gutwin, C., & Mandryk, R. L. (2017, October). The effects of navigation assistance on spatial learning and performance in a 3D game. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 341-353).
- Johanson, C., Gutwin, C., & Mandryk, R. (2023). Trails, rails, and over-reliance: How navigation assistance affects route-finding and spatial learning in virtual environments. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 103097.
- Trapsilawati, F., Wijayanto, T., & Jourdy, E. S. (2019). Human-computer trust in navigation systems: Google maps vs Waze. Communications in Science and Technology, 4(1), 38-43.
- Williams, M. A., Hurst, A., & Kane, S. K. (2013, October). " Pray before you step out" describing personal and situational blind navigation behaviors. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (pp. 1-8).
- Ge, Y., Qi, H., & Qu, W. (2023). The factors impacting the use of navigation systems: A study based on the technology acceptance model. Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behaviour, 93, 106-117.
- Laor, T., & Galily, Y. (2022). In WAZE we trust? GPS-based navigation application users’ behavior and patterns of dependency. Plos one, 17(11), e0276449.
- Friehs, M. A., Schmalbrock, P., Merz, S., Dechant, M., Hartwigsen, G., & Frings, C. (2024). A touching advantage: cross-modal stop-signals improve reactive response inhibition. Experimental Brain Research, 1-20.