Experts from Brown University (USA) used virtual reality technology and developed a model that can predict the behavior and movement of people in a crowd. The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Most common models are based on physics – the forces of attraction and repulsion, and do not fully describe why people in a group behave in a certain way.

To create the model, the scientists tracked the movements and interactions of people wearing virtual reality glasses in a virtual crowd. It turned out that like flocks of birds, herds of cattle or schools of fish, people try to move in a crowd as a whole, instead of choosing the direction of movement individually. The model proved to be able to predict the direction of crowd movement quite accurately.