Perceived Realism of Crowd Behaviour with Social Forces

This paper investigates the development of an urban crowd simulation for the purposes of psychophysical experimentation. Whilst artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing to produce more concise and interesting crowd behaviours, the number or sophistication of the algorithms implemented within a system does not necessarily guarantee its perceptual realism. Human perception is highly subjective and does not always conform to the reality of the situation. Therefore it is important to consider this aspect when dealing with AI implementations within a crowd system aimed at humans. In this research an initial two alternative forced choice (2AFC) with constant stimuli psychophysical experiment is presented. The purpose of the experiment is to assess whether human participants perceive crowd behaviour with a social forces model to be more realistic. Results from the experiment suggest that participants do consider crowd behaviour with social forces to be more realistic. This research could inform the development of crowd-based systems, especially those that consider viewer perception to be important, such as for example video games and other media.