A Review of Augmented Reality Applications for Building Evacuation

Abstract: Evacuation is one of the main disaster management solutions to reduce the impact of man-made and natural threats on building occupants. To date, several modern technologies and gamification concepts, e.g. immersive virtual reality and serious games, have been used to enhance building evacuation preparedness and effectiveness. Those tools have been used both to investigate human behavior during building emergencies and to train building occupants on how to cope with building evacuations. Augmented Reality (AR) is novel technology that can enhance this process providing building occupants with virtual contents to improve their evacuation performance. This work aims at reviewing existing AR applications developed for building evacuation. This review identifies the disasters and types of building those tools have been applied for. Moreover, the application goals, hardware and evacuation stages affected by AR are also investigated in the review. Finally, this review aims at identifying the challenges to face for further development of AR evacuation tools.