
When People Are as Predictable as Water [video] - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/when-people-are-as-predictable-as-water
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oskkejdjdkjd
There was a video I watched years ago about a specialist who studies the flow
of pedestrians and redesigns walkways to improve flow of pedestrians. I
remember she was working on an airport and there were two hallways joined at a
45 degree angle with a minor outcropping of walkway right at the joint. A lot
of people seemed to float around in the outcropping like turbulence, greatly
bottlenecking the flow of people. She installed a clever partition to smooth
the transition from one hall to the next and the bottle neck was resolved.
Still can’t find that video. I always found it interesting.

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theoh
It sounds like the kind of thing the London-based Space Syntax folks do. I
don't recognize the specific video you describe, but that is the kind of
thinking they're keen on. (It might have been Anna Rose.) That research
originally came out of an architecture school context.

[https://spacesyntax.com/](https://spacesyntax.com/)
[https://spacesyntax.com/buildings/transport/](https://spacesyntax.com/buildings/transport/)

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otto2
Resume: moving of a crowd can be simulated using fluid mechanics.

Video is a video of researcher talking about it.

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WAthrowaway
Obligatory incredible reddit comment about crowd crush
[https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arab...](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arabia_hajj_disaster_death_toll_at_least/cw5vxtm/?context=3)

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imh
The paper they're reporting on is pretty clever in its sourcing of
observations.

Abstract:

>Modeling crowd motion is central to situations as diverse as risk prevention
in mass events and visual effects rendering in the motion picture industry.
The difficulty of performing quantitative measurements in model experiments
has limited our ability to model pedestrian flows. We use tens of thousands of
road-race participants in starting corrals to elucidate the flowing behavior
of polarized crowds by probing its response to boundary motion. We establish
that speed information propagates over system-spanning scales through
polarized crowds, whereas orientational fluctuations are locally suppressed.
Building on these observations, we lay out a hydrodynamic theory of polarized
crowds and demonstrate its predictive power. We expect this description of
human groups as active continua to provide quantitative guidelines for crowd
management.

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/46](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/46)

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sublimeloge
On the computer graphics side of things, there's a 2006 paper based on
essentially the same underlying idea:

video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOvYyJ6r1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOvYyJ6r1c)

paper: [https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-
flows/](https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/)

