Modeling multi-agent motion dynamics in immersive rooms

Abstract

Immersive rooms are increasingly popular augmented reality systems that support multi-agent interactions within a virtual world. However, despite extensive content creation and technological developments, insights about perceptually-driven social dynamics, such as the complex movement patterns during virtual world navigation, remain largely underexplored. Computational models of motion dynamics can help us understand the underlying mechanism of human interaction in immersive rooms and develop applications that better support spatially distributed interaction. In this work, we propose a new agent-based model of emergent human motion dynamics. The model represents human agents as simple spatial geometries in the room that relocate and reorient themselves based on the salient virtual spatial objects they approach. Agent motion is modeled as an interactive process combining external diffusion-driven influences from the environment with internal self-propelling interactions among agents. Further, we leverage simulation-based inference (SBI) to show that the governing parameters of motion patterns can be estimated from simple observables. Our results indicate that the model successfully captures action-related agent properties but exposes local non-identifiability linked to environmental awareness. We argue that our simulation-based approach paves the way for creating adaptive, responsive immersive rooms -- spaces that adjust their interfaces and interactions based on human collective movement patterns and spatial attention.