PEAR is a joint ANR–FNR project involving Inria (VirtUs team, Rennes), LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) and the LCPP (firefighter department, Laboratoire Central de la Préfecture de Police de Paris) – a consortium further supported by two external expert partners, Hellfest Productions and Paléo Arts & Spectacles, who contribute their operational expertise in organising large-scale music festivals. It will run from 2027 to 2030.

This project is driven by the vision that the combination of realistic virtual crowd simulation, immersive XR technologies, and novel data visualization paradigms can fundamentally change the way large-scale events are planned and operational decisions are prepared – by shifting the perspective from a global, external view of crowds to an embodied, first-person experience of crowd dynamics. Our objectives are therefore threefold:

• To develop novel methods for creating realistic virtual crowds that can be authored and animated locally, directly on-site, using Augmented Reality — moving beyond the traditional, desk-based approach to crowd simulation.
• To design new crowd metrics and immersive, first-person visualization paradigms that support organisers and staff in understanding crowd dynamics from within, rather than from a bird’s-eye view.
• To rigorously evaluates these approaches by confronting them with the complexity of real operational situations, in ecologically valid conditions.

These approaches will be applied to three real-world use-cases: the New Year’s Eve celebration on the Champs-Élysées, led by the LCPP, a recurring challenge involving over one million people in a dense urban environment; the Hellfest festival, one of the largest metal music festivals in Europe, characterised by dense crowd configurations and a complex site topology; and the Paléo festival, a large multi-day open-air festival in Switzerland, contributing a complementary event format and scale.

Contacts: Ludovic Hoyet (website) & Fintan McGee (website)