Research

I am a research officer at the National Research Council Canada and an adjunct research professor in cognitive science at Carleton University.

Evacuation

Most of my research circles around questions on why and how people do (not) evacuate in emergency situations. This includes questions on what determines if and when people decide to evacuate in an emergency and how people find their way to safety. What are the underlying psychological mechanisms of evacuation decision making? I use immersive virtual reality (see below) to simulate complex and visually rich emergency scenarios, which enables studying evacuation with sufficient level of ecological validity and a high level of experimental control.

During my PhD research I focused on road tunnel evacuation. Accidents and fires in road tunnels can have severe consequences for tunnel occupants. Major tunnel catastrophes in European trans-alpine road tunnels (e.g., Mont-Blanc in 1999, St Gotthard in 2001) stimulated research which led to new safety standards for European road tunnels (e.g., Directive 2004/54/EC) and consequently improved safety. Despite these efforts and all technological progress other severe accidents occurred and the need for research on human factors became even more evident.

Social Influence

Most of the time, we are not alone when a fire alarm goes off or we are in an emergency. How do people influence each other during evacuation? How is our behavior coupled to our neighbors during evacuation? Does social influence thwart evacuation or can it also improve the outcome of the evacuation process?

  • Kinateder, M., Ronchi, E., Gromer, D., Müller, M., Jost, M., Nehfischer, M., Mühlberger, A., & Pauli, P. (2014). Social influence on route choice in a virtual reality tunnel fire. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 26, Part A(0), 116-125. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2014.06.003

  • Kinateder, M., Müller, M., Jost, M., Mühlberger, A. & Pauli, P. (2014). Social influence in a virtual tunnel fire – influence of conflicting information on evacuation behavior. Journal of Applied Ergonomics. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2014.05.014

  • Kinateder, M., & Warren, W. H. (2016). Social influence on evacuation behavior in real and virtual environments. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 3, 43. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00043

Improving evacuation outcomes

What can we do to prepare building occupants to evacuate efficiently when necessary? Human factors centered training and design solutions could mitigate the consequences of disaster. For example, training and drills in virtual environments allows practicing finding a place of safety in infrastructures we usually do not explore on foot (e.g., road tunnels). Affordance based design of evacuation signage could make egress routes more intuitive for all users when needed.

  • Kinateder, M.*, Ma, C.*, Gwynne, S., Amos, M., & Benichou, N. (2020). Where drills differ from evacuations: A case study on Canadian buildings. Safety Science, 135, 105114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105114

  • Kinateder, M., Pauli, P., Müller, M., Krieger, J., Heimbecher, F., Rönnau, I., Bergerhausen, U., Vollmann, G., Vogt, P., & Mühlberger, A. (2013). Human behaviour in severe tunnel accidents: Effects of information and behavioural training. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 17, 20-32. doi: 10.1016/j.trf.2012.09.001

Visual Features of Smoke

Visual motion cues can be created by self-motion, by solid moving objects, and by non-solids such as gases or fluids. This project aims to determine what types of motion cues are available to the visual system when viewing gaseous, as opposed to solid, motion stimuli, focussing on cues available for estimating the motion-in-depth of smoke and its time-to-contact with an observer. Analysis of simulted smoke plumes approaching a camera indicated that smoke contains reliable looming information but this information deviates systematically from a solid reference object (for example, because the smoke changes in both shape/size and distance over time). More interestingly, unlike for solid objects, the optic flow rate of expansion does not reliably indicate approaching smoke, which can most likely be explained by the low local coherence of motion cues of moving smoke. Nonetheless, the angular size of approaching smoke increases consistently over time, providing a cue for approaching smoke. However, this cue differs depending on smoke density.

  • Kinateder, M, Pfaff, A., & Cooper, E.A. (2017) The Visual Features of Smoke. Journal of Vision, 17(10):415 [poster]

Example smoke stimulus

Low vision

How do people with visual impairments navigate and orient in space? Can we use mobile devices to provide visual navigation aids for users with low vision? In this line of research, we are interested in basic and applied research on low vision (e.g., reduced visual acuity). For example, we recently tested the potential of a consumer augmented reality (AR) device for improving the functional vision of people with near-complete vision loss.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular approach to study human behavior in fire. Virtual environments provide a maximum of experimental control, are easy to replicate, have relatively high ecological validity, and allow safe study of occupant behavior in scenarios that otherwise would be too dangerous. To date there are very few validation studies that directly compare evacuation behavior in virtual and matched physical environments. I am interested in the question on what we can and cannot study in VR with regard to fire evacuation research.

  • Lovreglio, R., & Kinateder, M. (2020). Augmented reality for pedestrian evacuation research: promises and limitations. Safety science, 128, 104750. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.104750

  • Kinateder, M., Ronchi, E., Nilsson, D., Kobes, M., Müller, M., Pauli, P. & Mühlberger, A. Virtual Reality for Fire Evacuation Research. In 1st Complex Events and Information Modelling at the 2014 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, (pp. 319 – 327), Warsaw, Poland.

  • Kinateder, M., & Warren, W. H. (2016). Social influence on evacuation behavior in real and virtual environments. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 3, 43. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2016.00043

Brown University's Virtual Environment Navigation Laboratory (VENLab), where I was a postdoctoral fellow (funded by DAAD and DFG) with Dr. William H. Warren, is one of the largest ambulatory virtual environments in the world at over 168 square meters and allows the free navigation in a complete immersive virtual environment.

The 3D-Multisensorik Labor at the University of Würzburg is one of the biggest European VR labs and was specifically designed for safety and security research. It features a 5 side 3D projection CAVE system, in which participants can move around freely.