Abstract: To improve the ecological validity of pedestrian evacuation under fire in highway tunnels, a 6DoF pedestrian evacuation experimental system based on the virtual reality(VR) allinone machine embedded with Insideout positioning for highway tunnels is developed. When the system was applied to the experiment, the participants could get away from the constraints of mouse, handle, and other control modes as well as equipment cables. The experiment was completed using perception information and autonomous action of 6DoF in the virtual scene, and the system could obtain the speed characteristic data of the participants through realtime tracking and positioning. To validate its effectiveness, the system was used to conduct evacuation experiments in three scenarios: real open space, virtual empty tunnel, and virtual fire accident tunnel. The data of 30 participants in different scenarios, including movement speed, movement track, emotional response, immersion sense, and presence sense, were collected. The experimental results of the real empty space tunnel and virtual empty tunnel, and virtual empty tunnel and virtual fire accident tunnel were compared. The experimental results indicate the following: (1) The headwearing VR device did not cause vertigo to participants. (2) The participants had a strong sense of presence in the virtual fire scene, and the characteristics of their emotional response, moving track, and moving speed were consistent with those in the real scene, indicating that the system has good application effectiveness. 

Key words: highway tunnel, virtual reality technology, pedestrian evacuation experiment system