Abstract
The collective behavior of human crowds often exhibits surprisingly regular patterns of movement. These patterns stem from social interactions between pedestrians such as when individuals imitate others, follow their neighbors, avoid collisions with other pedestrians, or push each other. While some of these patterns are beneficial and promote efficient collective motion, others can seriously disrupt the flow, ultimately leading to deadly crowd disasters. Understanding the dynamics of crowd movements can help urban planners manage crowd safety in dense urban areas and develop an understanding of dynamic social systems. However, the study of crowd behavior has been hindered by technical and methodological challenges. Laboratory experiments involving large crowds can be difficult to organize, and quantitative field data collected from surveillance cameras are difficult to evaluate. Nevertheless, crowd research has undergone important developments in the past few years that have led to numerous research opportunities. For example, the development of crowd monitoring based on the virtual signals emitted by pedestrians' smartphones has changed the way researchers collect and analyze live field data. In addition, the use of virtual reality, and multi-user platforms in particular, have paved the way for new types of experiments. In this review, we describe these methodological developments in detail and discuss how these novel technologies can be used to deepen our understanding of crowd behavior.
Highlights
Understanding crowd movementsis key to the management of dense pedestrian flows in urban areas
We describe how the emergence of virtual sensing and virtual reality can boost crowd research, their potential applications, and corresponding challenges
Conventional methods of crowd monitoring are difficult to implement for tracking large crowds, and experimental approaches often face organizational and ethical challenges
Summary
Understanding crowd movementsis key to the management of dense pedestrian flows in urban areas. Recent studies have shown that the frequency and severity of deadly crowd accidents have increased over the past decades (Helbing et al, 2007, 2014; Helbing and Mukerji, 2012). In September 2015, one of the most dramatic crowd stampedes occurred in Mecca during which thousands of pilgrims were crushed to death in a dense crowd (Khan and Noji, 2016). This tragedy is one example of a series of accidents that have occurred in the past decade, costing many lives and undermining trust in public institutions.
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