Assessing crowd management strategies for the 2010 Love Parade disaster using computer simulations and virtual reality

Abstract

<jats:p>Dense crowds in public spaces have often caused serious security issues at large events. In this paper, we study the 2010 Love Parade disaster, for which a large amount of data (e.g. research papers, professional reports and video footage) exist. We reproduce the Love Parade disaster in a three-dimensional computer simulation calibrated with data from the actual event and using the social force model for pedestrian behaviour. Moreover, we simulate several crowd management strategies and investigate their ability to prevent the disaster. We evaluate these strategies in virtual reality (VR) by measuring the response and arousal of participants while experiencing the simulated event from a festival attendee’s perspective. Overall, we find that opening an additional exit and removing the police cordons could have significantly reduced the number of casualties. We also find that this strategy affects the physiological responses of the participants in VR.</jats:p>

The One-Man-Crowd: Single User Generation of Crowd Motions Using Virtual Reality

“…Recent research leveraged VR to study collective behaviours using a multi-user [41,54] or, most often, a single-user immersion in a virtually crowded VE [44,65]. VR offers several benefits, among which: a single participant at a time is needed, conditions can be accurately replicated, data collection is greatly facilitated, post-processing efforts are reduced, etc.…”

The Impact of Animations in the Perception of a Simulated Crowd

“…There exists many studies to model the evacuation of virtual crowds in disaster scenarios like fire, earthquakes, flooding, storms or civil disorders [23], [24]. Zhao et al reproduced the 2010 Love Parade disaster using virtual reality to study the behavior of participants and help organizers to avoid this kind of disasters in the future [30].…”

Prospects for use of extended reality technology for ship passenger evacuation simulation

“…XR technologies offer a chance to perform these tasks without putting persons in any actual danger. Evacuation procedures of passengers onboard can be improved analysing the results of virtual experiments where humans are exposed, for instance, to fire and smoke and their level of stress is monitored (Cosma, Ronchi and Nilsson, 2016;Zhao et al, 2020). Also, VR/AR environment can be complemented with spreading of fire and smoke based on the results reached using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) procedures (Yan et al, 2020).…”