VELOS - A VR Environment for Ship Applications: Current Status and Planned Extensions.

Virtual Environment for Life On Ships (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that supports 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 the ship design accordingly [10]. Realistic simulations of behavioral aspects of crowd in emergency conditions require modeling of panic aspects and social conventions of inter-relations. The present paper provides a description of the enhanced crowd modeling approach employed in VELOS for the performance of ship evacuation assessment and analysis based on the guidelines provided by IMO’s Circular MSC 1238/2007 [20].