(Pedestrians) choose paths that allow them to more directly face their endpoint as they start the route, even if a path that began by heading more to the left or right might actually end up being shorter.
Today’s invention is a way, based on this MIT research, to set up natural pedestrian flows within a city, so that an effective one-way system emerges -without street signage or policing.
If a pedestrian at A can see some kind of beacon above point B -a building he wants to reach, he will choose a route that most closely looks like it’s going there. Later on, the route deflects as shown, but the pedestrian persists and gets to the desired destination. The situation is similar for the person at B trying to get to A.
This would lessen the tendency for collisions between pedestrians in crowds and thus smooth and speed the transits of many individuals.
This natural, vector-based navigation behaviour could be exploited in numerous crowd safety applications.
