Abstract:
“Virtual Environment for Life On Ships” (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality
(VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design
Process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic
Conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This paper focuses
On presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and
Evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: i) capability of multiple
Users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, ii)
Real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment
Events and crowd-behavior parameters, iii) capability of agents and
Avatars to move continuously on decks, iv) integrated framework for both the
Simplified and the advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033
Circular, v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model
Suitable for evacuation analysis, vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and vii) post
Processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information
For the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using
Three evacuation test cases for a ro-ro passenger ship.