The Visual Coupling between Neighbors in Real and Virtual Crowds

Many models of crowd behavior are based on local interactions between pedestrians, but little is known about the actual mechanisms governing these interactions. In Experiments 1 and 2, a participant walked with three human ‘confederates’ or a virtual crowd of 30, while the heading direction or speed of a subset of neighbors was manipulated. In Experiment 3, real crowds of 16 or 20 walked together in a swarming scenario. We find that pedestrians are unidirectionally coupled to neighbors ahead of them, the influence of multiple neighbors is linearly combined, and their weights decrease with distance.