Crowd Controlled
This project centers itself between two iconic, but opposite directed phenomena of the present pandemic: the inflation of surveillance and the disappearance of the crowd. The present developments of social distancing and surveillance will be explored in how they affect our concept of the social and the aesthetics of our future public space. For instance, how will cities appear when devoid of crowds, will the smart city operate as technological panacea, or can we re-strategies the crowd as a hybrid (digital-physical) phenomenon in its movements, rhythms and eruptions?
The Project
Keywords:Artificial Intelligence, Unreal Engine, Surveillance, Crowd, COVID-19
We developed an integrated game application that is embedded with an AI system (facial detection, facial feature extraction and emotional analysis). The AI system extracts the facial features of the visitor and converts these into a 3D digital character. This 3D character will be imported into the gaming engine. Every detected visitor will be represented as an idiosyncratic agent. Also every agentwill have a so-called behavioral profile - an AI system - based on the emotional profile extracted from the visitor. With the accumulation of agents in the gaming engine the objective of the application is that the agents form a crowd in the gaming engine. When this happens depends on the interactions of the agents and the dynamics of the gaming engine. Our focus of this project pertained to rethinking, under the disappearing phenomena of the crowd, and the intensification of surveillance, how digital crowds could obtain a novel political momentum. We can imagine that the platform we’ve created could function, in the absence of social gatherings, as an alternative to participate in, and observe the phenomena of crowds.
Screenshot of opening scene
Screenshots
Prototype of Interface
Support
Thanks to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) for their generous support of the project.