Simplifying Crowd Automation in the Virtual Laboratory of Archaeology

AbstractVirtual archaeology projects have been evolving to go beyond a mere reconstruction of architecture and artefacts of heritage sites: human interaction with the environment is also an object of research for historians and archaeologists. Methodologies like the London Charter propose that historians and archaeologists, in close collaboration with technical teams, lead virtual archaeology projects to guarantee the credibility and scientific validation of the result. The question is how to allow historians to model crowds on their own, if lacking the required skills to programme complex artificial intelligent-driven autonomous agents. In this article a method is proposed, currently under development, to allow non-programmers will be able to successfully model crowds using very simple tools that do not require formal programming knowledge but can still provide convincing results. The underlying idea is to employ concepts borrowed from computer games, whose interfaces are targeted to non-experts and adapt them to the specificities of virtual world platforms like Second Life® and OpenSimulator. Moreover, some limitations and ideas for further extension are discussed