Urban encounters: the game of real life

Abstract

In this paper we describe our ongoing work on modelling urban encounters by extending Conway's Game of Life. We develop our model based on empirical data collected using a Tamagotchi-like mobile game that recorded people's encounters by sensing nearby devices using Bluetooth. Our findings include the identification of useful ways to capture and analyse data to derive a model of encounter, and a set of rules that can be used to drive our model. We also identify interesting patterns in the behaviour of our simulations that can help us understand, and in certain cases predict, urban encounter.