Virtual reality allows creating highly immersive visual and auditory experiences, making users feel physically present in the environment. This makes it an ideal platform to simulate dangerous scenarios, including fire evacuation, and study human behaviour without exposing users to harmful elements. However, human perception of the surroundings is based on the integration of multiple sensory cues (visual, auditory, tactile, or/and olfactory) present in the environment. When some of the sensory stimuli are missing in the virtual experience, it can break the illusion of being there in the environment and could lead to actions that deviate from normal behaviour. In this work, we added an olfactory cue in a well-documented historic hotel fire scenario that was recreated in VR, and examined the effects of the olfactory cue on human behaviour. We conducted a between subject study on 40 naive participants. Our results show that the addition of the olfactory cue could increase behavioural realism. We found that 80% of the studied actions for the VR with olfactory cue condition matched the ones performed by the survivors. In comparison, only 40% of the participants' actions for VR only condition were similar to the survivors.

翻译：虚拟现实能够营造高度沉浸的视觉与听觉体验，使使用者产生身处环境中的临场感。这使其成为模拟火灾疏散等危险场景、研究人类行为且无需将参与者暴露于有害因素的理想平台。然而，人类对环境的感知依赖于环境中多种感官线索（视觉、听觉、触觉和/或嗅觉）的整合。当虚拟体验中缺失某些感官刺激时，可能打破身处环境的沉浸幻觉，并导致偏离正常行为的行为反应。本研究在基于历史资料重建的知名酒店火灾虚拟现实场景中，添加了嗅觉线索，并考察了该线索对人类行为的影响。我们开展了一项涉及40名无经验参与者的组间实验。结果表明，添加嗅觉线索能够提升行为真实性。研究发现，在带有嗅觉线索的虚拟现实条件下，所研究的参与者行为中有80%与幸存者行为一致；相比之下，仅使用虚拟现实条件的参与者行为仅有40%与幸存者相似。