CAN YOU tell the mood of a crowd? Can you pick someone out of a crowd just from their voice? Could you estimate how many people were at the St Patrick’s Day parade or the Irish rugby team homecoming? A research project at Trinity College Dublin aims to answer these questions.
Metropolis, a Trinity College project supported by Science Foundation Ireland, aims to create a simulation of Dublin, bringing together computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research.
The project consists of nine experiments aimed at finding out how we perceive the appearance, motion, behaviour and sounds of crowds. The experiments investigate how many people in a crowd need to look in a particular direction before we follow their gaze, how quickly we can spot a particular person among a crowd, and how quickly a moving object can be located in a busy traffic scene.
Visitors to the project, at the Science Gallery on Dublin’s Pearse Street, will be asked to pick someone out of a crowd just from their voice, to identify the overall mood of the crowd and to spot a horse disguised to look like a sheep.
The project is a collaboration between Prof Carol O’Sullivan, of the Graphics, Vision and Visualisation group, Prof Fiona Newell of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and Prof Henry Rice of the School of Engineering, with more than 20 researchers also involved.
While the group have previously produced an interactive map of Dublin City and a virtual Dublin, Prof O’Sullivan said they were now building on the research with the addition of crowds and sound.
She believes the experiment could contribute towards the development of evacuation simulation and of assistive technologies for people with disabilities.
Prof Rice said commercially the project could help with urban planning. “By simulating the pattern of traffic, the model could be used for predicting the effect of car-free days, showing what certain areas of the city would look and sound like . . . ,” he said.