Modelling of collective movement in immersive environments

Immersive technologies allow us to map physical reality by means of 4D virtual systems in ever higher spatial and temporal detail, up to a scale level of 1:1. This level of detail enables the representation of phenomena that have been widely ignored by the geovisualization research agenda as yet. An example for such a large scale phenomenon is the collective movement of animals, which can be modelled and visualized only at a fine grained spatio-temporal resolution. This paper focuses on how collective movement can be modelled in an immersive virtual reality (VR) geovisualization. In a brief introduction on immersion and spatial presence we will argue, that high fidelity and realistic VR can strengthen the users’ involvement with the issues visualized. We will then discuss basic characteristics of swarming in nature and review the principal models that have been presented to formalize this collective behavior. Based on the rules of (1) collision avoidance, (2) polarization, (3) aggregation and (4) self-organized criticality we will formulate a viable solution of modelling collective movement within a geovisualization immersive virtual environment. An example of use and results will be presented.