Dispersion of personal spaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates how individuals choose seats in a lecture hall, modeling the process and comparing it to real-time footage to understand the dynamics of personal space dispersion.

Contribution

It introduces models of seat selection based on experimental data and evaluates their relevance against actual observational footage.

Findings

Models capture basic seat selection behaviors

Entropy of seat configurations evolves similarly in models and real data

Some models effectively replicate real seating patterns

Abstract

There are many entities that disseminate in the physical space - information, gossip, mood, innovation etc. Personal spaces are also entities that disperse and interplay. In this work we study the emergence of configurations formed by participants when choosing a place to sit in a rectangular auditorium. Based on experimental questionnaire data we design several models and assess their relevancy to a real time-lapse footage of lecture hall being filled up. The main focus is to compare the evolution of entropy of occupied seat configurations in time. Even though the process of choosing a seat is complex and could depend on various properties of participants or environment, some of the developed models can capture at least basic essence of the real processes. After introducing the problem of seat selection and related results in close research areas, we introduce preliminary collected data and build models of seat selection based on them. We compare the resulting models to the real observational data and discuss areas of future research directions.