Towards Sound-based Crowd Management: Investigating Sonification for Pedestrian Steering.

Enabling automated and non-intrusive management of pedestrian flows can help unlock intelligent public environments to maximize individual comfort and wayfinding efficiency. An effective option for this purpose is using dynamic nudging stimuli generated through the use of smart technologies. For this purpose, recent experimental studies have considered visual stimuli to steer pedestrians into alternative walking routes. This research lays the basis for using sonification as a pedestrian flow nudging mechanism. We have developed and deployed a spatialized dynamic sonification to nudge between alternative walking patterns in a real-life work environment endowed with highly accurate and automated pedestrian tracking. In this paper, we report on our preliminary nudging results showing that sound can alter the typical walking trajectories, yet counterintuitively.