A large-scale real-life crowd steering experiment via arrow-like stimuli

TL;DR

This paper presents 'Moving Light,' a large-scale real-life experiment with 140,000 participants demonstrating how arrow-like stimuli can systematically influence pedestrian routing decisions in crowd management scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel large-scale crowd steering experiment and quantitatively evaluates the effectiveness of arrow stimuli in influencing pedestrian choices.

Findings

Arrow stimuli can bias pedestrian routing decisions effectively.

High-resolution tracking enables accurate assessment of steering efficiency.

Large-scale real-world data supports systematic crowd management strategies.

Abstract

We introduce "Moving Light": an unprecedented real-life crowd steering experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding question of paramount societal and technological importance: "can we seamlessly and systematically influence routing decisions in pedestrian crowds?" Establishing effective crowd steering methods is extremely relevant in the context of crowd management, e.g. when it comes to keeping floor usage within safety limits (e.g. during public events with high attendance) or at designated comfort levels (e.g. in leisure areas). In the Moving Light setup, visitors walking in a corridor face a choice between two symmetric exits defined by a large central obstacle. Stimuli, such as arrows, alternate at random and perturb the symmetry of the environment to bias choices. While visitors move in the experiment, they are tracked with high space and time resolution, such that the efficiency of each stimulus at steering individual routing decisions can be accurately evaluated a posteriori. In this contribution, we first describe the measurement concept in the Moving Light experiment and then we investigate quantitatively the steering capability of arrow indications.