Humans make their evacuation decisions first at strategic/tactical levels, deciding their exit and route choice and then at operational level, navigating to a way-point, avoiding collisions. What influences an individuals at tactical level is of importance, for modelers to design a high fidelity simulation or for safety engineers to create efficient designs/codes. Does an unlit exit sign dissuades individual(s) to avoid a particular exit/route and vice versa? What effect does the crowd's choices have on individual's decision making? To answer these questions, we studied the effect of exit signage (unlit/lit), different proportions of crowd movement towards the exits, and the combined (reinforcing/conflicting) effect of the sign and the crowd treatment on reaction times and exit choices of participants in an immersive virtual reality(VR) evacuation experiment. We found that there is tolerance for queuing when different sources of information, exit signage and crowd movement reinforced one another. The effect of unlit exit signage on dissuading individuals from using a particular exit/route was significant. The virtual crowd was ineffective at encouraging utilization of a particular exit/route but had a slight repulsive effect. Additionally, we found some similarities between previous studies based on screen-based evacuation experiments and our VR-based experiment.

翻译：人类在疏散过程中首先在策略/战术层面做出决策，选择出口和路线，然后在操作层面导航至路径点并避免碰撞。影响个体战术层面决策的因素对于建模者设计高保真模拟，或安全工程师制定高效设计/规范至关重要。未点亮的出口标志是否会使个体避开特定出口/路线？反之，点亮标志是否会产生不同影响？人群的选择对个体决策有何作用？为解答这些问题，我们通过沉浸式虚拟现实疏散实验，研究了出口标志（未点亮/点亮）、不同比例人群向出口移动的趋势，以及标志与人群处理组合（强化/冲突）效应，对参与者反应时间和出口选择的影响。发现当出口标志与人群移动信息相互强化时，个体会容忍排队行为。未点亮出口标志对劝阻个体使用特定出口/路线具有显著效果。虚拟人群虽未能有效促使个体使用特定出口/路线，但表现出轻微排斥效应。此外，我们发现基于屏幕的疏散实验与本研究虚拟现实实验之间存在一定相似性。