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Abstract
Understanding the human factors governing effective information exchange is increasingly indispensable for the design of day to day human-computer systems. Moreover, effective information exchange becomes a matter of life or death during emergency egress. The complexity of an unknown environment and the unpredictable locations of hazards often prevent evacuees from identifying safe routes. Successful evacuations from locations impacted by fire or earthquakes may depend on user-generated information to increase the chance of collective survival. The present paper employed multi-user virtual reality experiments and an online survey to investigate the mechanisms underlying social influence and collective intelligence during emergencies. Our results demonstrate that information sharing helps to reduce evacuation time and trajectory length. Participants also shared more when given incentives or when there was a lack of knowledge in the public information pool. This work provides further indications of how collective intelligence can be promoted and deployed during emergencies.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hantao Zhao
Hantao Zhao is an Associate Professor in the School of Cyber Science and Engineering at Southeast University. Previously, he received his PhD degree from ETH Zurich, with a focus on responsive environment and virtual reality. His research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction and intelligent public space.
Tyler Thrash
Tyler Thrash was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich. His work focuses on spatial cognition and navigation from a largely ecological/Gibsonian perspective. He also develops simulations for interactive virtual environments and mathematical models for understanding human behavior.
Fabian Schläfli
Fabian Schläfli is currently a master’s student of computer science at ETH. He has graduated from ETH with a bachelor’s degree and has been a research assistant for the Chair of Cognitive Science and Computational Social Science at ETH.
Mubbasir Kapadia
Mubbasir Kapadia is the Director of the Intelligent Visual Interfaces Lab and an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. Previously, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich and the Assistant Director of the Human Modeling Simulation Lab at University of Pennsylvania.
Leonel Aguilar
Leonel Aguilar is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cognitive Science group and the Data Science, Systems and Services laboratory ETH Zurich. Previously he has held postdoctoral appointments at the Computational Social Science group, ETH Zurich and University of Tokyo.
Dirk Helbing
Dirk Helbing is a Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich and affiliate of its Computer Science Department. He is a member of the external faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and cofounded the Decision Science Laboratory at ETH.
Christoph Hölscher
Christoph Hölscher is a Full Professor of Cognitive Science in the DGESS at ETH Zurich since 2013, with an emphasis on Applied Cognitive Science. Since 2016 Christoph is a Principal Investigator at the Singapore ETH Center Future Cities Laboratory and is the Program Director of Future Resilient Systems.