Towards a virtual environment for capturing behavior in cultural crowds

Abstract

Cultural behavior is an area of research that can allow us to further cross-cultural understanding, and is now starting to integrate itself within the field of information technology. One domain that expresses these behaviors is inside a crowd, however the analysis of micro-level crowd behavior is impractical in a real-world setting as passive observation has limitations on understanding true behavior. By using a virtual environment to simulate a crowd situation, measuring an individual's in-crowd behavior becomes feasible. This paper introduces the development of a virtual environment which enables the creation of different types of cultural crowds with which the user may interact. The parameterization of the crowds is based on the famous cultural dimensions put forward by Hofstede. One of the cultural dimensions, individualism/collectivism, was mapped to agent characteristics during a series of simulations and it was found that two distinct types of crowd could be generated. For the dimensions have not yet been examined, the proposed environment provides an ideal opportunity to address this gap in the research as well as becoming a tool with which other types of experimentation can be performed.