The laboratory is engaged in a unique, multidisciplinary effort to understand how humans use their knowledge of some complex indoor environment to guide their movements, as they interact with other individuals and crowds who are also moving about in that same environment. This project is part of an NSF-sponsored collaboration on human and social dynamics. The principal investigators include a cognitive neuroscientist, a roboticist, and an applied mathematician.
All of the work, at Brandeis and at the University of Southern California, shares a common testbed --navigation and social behaviors in the context of a science museum, the California Science Center. We expect that the project will aid architects and others involved in building design, particularly as they plan for the efficient movement of people inside buildings, including circumstances in which buildings must be evacuated rapidly, as in an emergency. Part of the work at Brandeis exploits the technology of interactive virtual reality to explore people's navigation strategies in a virtual reality version of the museum.
Here is a Quicktime movie walkthrough a part of vMuseum's main floor. This walkthrough is guided, not interactive as it is during our experiments.