I’m having a dimensional moment… [yeah, yeah yeah, blame it on the beach.]
Imagine the space of all people, all personalities, all personal characteristics. There are certainly patterns in people, in their behavior, across different people. One can think about stereotypes, about what behaviors result from personality differences. Yet, think about the typography of the space of all people. Imagine that each person is simply a line through all of the dimensions of possibilities, yet along a typography that has plenty of holes such that certain characteristics cannot exist without other characteristics.
People always ask me why i’m obsessed with observing human behavior, why i’m obsessed with the patterns that people form in their actions, why i’m so curious to see the role of stereotypes and expectations. I’m fascinated by the typography of personal existence, of the dimensionality of people. I’m in love with the possibility that a model could be constructed of human existence, yet know that the model still exists in the realm of chaos, beyond our basic understanding. But as i sit and watch people, i am fascinated by the intersections that form, by being able see some of the relationships, see the holes within the space.
Ah, how i still adore the bridge between the sciences and humanity, to see the beauty in human behavior. Thinking about social psychology as a mathematical form, about behavior as a modeling opportunity…
Oh, how i’m itching to be thinking about modeling and dimensionality again. My hypertext roots are aching. After thesis… after thesis… ah, what a mantra.
Well I think we’ve sorted all that out now. If you’d like to know, I can tell you that in your Universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn’t want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the Universe is a lot more complicated then you might think. — Douglas Adams, “Mostly Harmless”
People do not think about everything in the same building before they move – they can only react to what they see. They look at the empty space, and move into that.
Concept — “information space”. To move objects efficiently in VR they shouldn’t interrogate each other. They should interrogate the space around them to find out whether there’s anything nearby that should be avoided. + The beauty of the idea is that the immediate vicinity of an individual is the same size whether there are ten people in the crowd or a million.
In crowds, the key interactions are short-range. Life?
A new geometry… March 1994, New Scientist magazine:: symplectic geometry, one ingredient of chaos theory. ‘Symplectic’ just means ‘complex’, but its mathematical associations are those of the complex numbers, in which minus one has a square root. In symplectic space a line is always at right angles to itself. Symplectic geometry includes velocities as well as positions, it is a geometry of motion.
Used to model the motion of individuals in crowds.
Human crowds do not flow in beautiful, intricate mathematically regular patterns.
There is no fixed formula for crowd flow. There is but space. Thoughts lunging into the most likely gap.
A glimpse of the right mathematical framework.
The images are fractals. Orchids.
Orchids don’t solve the crowd problem, not on their own, but are beautiful.
Watching trasmuted light:
It was like boids, self-organizing into flocks, sweeping majestically round virtual obstacles in their self-contained computer world, breaking and reforming… It was the shadow of the cobweb.
Two years later “Legion” is created and turned into a fully-fledged design tool.
Each ‘entity’ could interrogate its information space, ‘fractal landscape’.
Each simulated person was equipped with some idea of where they wanted to go…
Where do you want to go? Under the cobweb shadow if you have a chance.
To D. Boyd from K
Wow, K, that’s fabulous – thank you so much for sharing!