Crowdsourcing: Using Real-Time Social Media Data to Repopulate the Socially Distanced World

The paper suggests that one of the aspects of the pre-Covid world that is most missed in the ‘new normal’ is the social experience of crowds and that immersive media might compensate for this. The nature of crowds is explored with a view to identifying the parameters for successful crowd simulation. There is a brief survey of computer crowd simulation which identifies some of the challenges together with descriptions of some recent games which feature crowds as a significant element. The paper then describes a method using real-time searches of social media content derived from Twitter as an extended data set which can be used to produce variety in the individual agents making up generated crowds and so provide a closer simulation of the crowd experience.