Investigation on Enhancing Fire Threat Perception in Virtual Reality through Subject-Expectancy Effect

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the use of subject-expectancy effect on enhancing fire threat perception in virtual reality. The study involves a virtual fire scenario design and 33 participants who experience virtual fires of three different scales in the scenario using a head-mounted display as visual and auditory perception and adopting physical movement in real world as their way of locomotion. The experiment investigates the subject-expectancy effect on cognitive safe distance judgements from the virtual fires with the absence and presence of self-made thermal radiation device as the primary manipulated variable. The collected data is evaluated statistically with boxplots assisted to facilitate the identification. The study found that the application of the subject-expectancy effect has only slight benefit on the realism of the fire scenario in virtual reality.