CrowdCollab
What?
Crowd management is important to provide safety for crowded events. Crowd planning takes up 90% of crowd management and requires collaboration within interdisciplinary teams. However, existing crowd management technologies often lack to facilitate dynamic and collaborative interaction between stakeholders and often underestimate the importance of the planning process. In this paper, we present CrowdCollab, an interactive table-based tangible interface accompanied by an Augmented Reality device that facilitates collaboration, fostering an exploratory and multi-perspective approach. User studies were conducted with 16 participants to evaluate the collaborative nature and overall usability of the system. The findings demonstrate valuable insights in the way our design fosters shared understanding, collaboration and an engaging experience in interacting with digital twins. The paper shows the potential of CrowdCollab to enable Crowd Management Teams to take an exploratory, interactive and collaborative approach in crowd planning.
What did I contribute?
Brainstorming and ideation
Physical realization and prototyping
Software programming in Unity3D and processing
Conducting the user studies
Developed skills
Hard- & software development
Interconnected digital systems
Use of computer vision markers
Research Through Design methods
What were my main takeaways?
Computer vision markers are an excellent and quick tool for prototyping interactions in both 2D and 3D environments
I noticed I found a passion for developing interfaces that allow people to collaborate using physical and digital elements
Augmented Reality is a promising feature that allows users to feel more integrated in the environment and is especially useful in fostering communication between users that have different perspectives (top-down vs. immersed perspective).