Summary of PEAR proposal
Large-scale events – music festivals, sporting ceremonies, parades – have become a defining feature of contemporary social life, with crowd management challenges now routinely confronting organizers and public authorities at the planning stage. While the operational stage benefits from increasingly sophisticated technological support, the planning stage remains far less served by dedicated tools. Crowd simulation is one of the few available options, yet its scope is inherently limited: it captures flow dynamics but not the full diversity of crowd behaviours organizers must account for – how attendees perceive their environment, how safety is experienced from within a crowd, or how staff should navigate complex situations. A more fundamental limitation persists: no desk-based tool can convey what an organizer or safety officer will actually face on the ground. Concrete questions such as “How visible are evacuation signs from within a dense crowd?” or “What does a bottleneck look like from the inside?” simply cannot be answered from plans or simulation outputs.
PEAR is driven by the hypothesis that combining realistic virtual crowd simulation, immersive eXtended Reality (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. Rather than configuring a simulation from a desk, PEAR envisions placing practitioners inside a virtually populated version of their event site, enabling them to explore crowd situations locally and interactively, in situ, before the event takes place.
Achieving this vision requires addressing three interconnected scientific challenges. The first is the shift from global to local crowd authoring: PEAR develops novel methods enabling users to author and explore crowd behaviours interactively at specific locations within a real environment via AR, without requiring the full site topology in advance. The second concerns designing meaningful immersive XR experiences for crowd management: deploying AR raises open questions about ecological validity and the ability to provide actionable first-person information to practitioners in real operational conditions. The third addresses novel immersive paradigms for crowd data visualization: transposing crowd metrics to a first-person context – or defining new ones such as perceived occlusion, local visibility range, or directional signage visibility – raises fundamental questions about what information is worth computing and how to display it immersively.
To address these challenges, PEAR brings together three complementary scientific partners – Inria (virtual crowd simulation and animation), LIST (AR and immersive data visualization), and LCPP (operational crowd safety expertise and direct access to the New Year’s Eve celebration on the Champs-Élysées, involving over one million people) – alongside Paléo Arts & Spectacles and Hellfest Productions, providing access to real festival sites for ecologically valid evaluations. Scientific outputs will include open-source software and datasets targeting computer graphics, XR, visualization, and crowd safety communities. Ultimately, PEAR aims to demonstrate that an embodied, first-person perspective can provide organizers with a qualitatively new form of spatial understanding – one no existing tool currently offers – with measurable benefits for the safety and efficiency of large-scale event organisation.