Influence of architectural visual access on emergency wayfinding: A cross-cultural study in China, United Kingdom and United States

This study examines the effects of architectural visual access on people's wayfinding behavior and evacuation performance during building emergencies using virtual reality. Fire evacuation experiments were conducted in an immersive virtual metro station, which was based on a real metro station in Beijing, China. A total of 226 participants, positioned among evenly or unevenly distributed crowd, were asked to evacuate the station that was designed with low or high visual access, manipulated through building design features (e.g., changing wall materials, removing columns in hallways). Crowd was presented in the virtual metro station by incorporating non-player characters assigned to different evacuation routes. To explore the possible influence of cultural background on participants' wayfinding behavior, experiments were conducted in London, Beijing, and Los Angeles. The results showed that improving architectural visual access could improve participants' virtual evacuation performance during emergencies; it could also influence participants' directional choices during evacuation, depending on the design strategy used and the spatial characteristics of the building. In addition, participants' tendency of following the crowd was reduced when there was an alternative route with high architectural visual access.