Fire Response performance - Behavioural research in virtual Reality

Fire response performance is the ability of an individual to perceive and validate clues of danger and to make decisions that are effective with regard to survive a fire situation with none or little health complications subsequently. In general little information is known about human behaviour in fires yet. Human behaviour in fires is mainly studied by incident evaluations and real-life experiments, such as unannounced evacuation drills. Since in virtual environment test persons can be faced with the phenomenon of fire in a safe way, without being exposed to the extreme health risk of a real fire, the application of a behavioural assessment and research tool in virtual reality seems to be a valuable supplement on the existing research methods. The possibilities of a virtual environment for studying human behaviour in fires are so far hardly adopted by researchers. In this paper the development of an innovative virtual reality based research instrument will be discussed together with the methodology for the validation of the instrument.