Brasilia, Brazil, 29 March - 3 April 1999
Virtual Beings: Emergence of population level movement
behaviours from individual rulesets
Chirron Mottram, Ruth Conroy, Alasdair Turner and Alan Penn
Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment
The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
(Torrington Place Site)
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
England
tel (44) (0)171 391 1782
fax (44) (0)171 916 1887
email c.mottram@ucl.ac.uk
www http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/
Space syntax research has shown that patterns of pedestrian and vehicular
movement are strongly correlated with the pattern of space in urban areas
and inside buildings. These findings are based on observations of movement
patterns of large numbers of people. However, the possible mechanisms
at the individual level which might lead to such population level effects
are not well understood.
This paper reports on ongoing research using VR technology to try to simulate
"life like" behaviour in a world of virtual beings. A variable
field of view, collision detection and a sense of vision was given to
the virtual beings. A number of "rule sets" were then used to
try and mimic human behaviour characteristics including both probabilistic
and learning algorithms. Research using simple rule sets for attraction
surfaces imposed on a spatial configuration have been found to be problematic
showing behaviours such as individuals as becoming "stuck" to
walls. More complex rulesets involving the view shed for each individual
and awareness of other beings were then tested.
The movement of each being around the world was tracked and a 'trail'
was produced which was then compared both to the trails produced by real
experimental subjects moving around the same world using an immersive
VR headset and to the syntactic properties of the world itself. This comparison
is allowing us to specify plausible cognitive models for individual behaviour
that might give rise to the collective patterns observed in conventional
syntax research.
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