Pheromander: Real-Time Strategy with Digital Pheromones

Human-swarm interaction is a recent research topic on how human operators can support a swarm of semiautonomous agents fulfilling certain tasks, like foraging or combat missions. In this paper, a serious game simulating a swarm of 50-250 ant-like agents is presented which have to collect resources and fight enemies. Digital pheromones (virtual chemical signals that diffuse over time) are used for their indirect communication. A mouse-based human-swarm interface is presented which allows players to interact with its agents by placing pheromones by clicking on the map. Wrapping the interface into a game allowed to develop and test it without requiring actual swarm hardware, to engage and motivate the user as well as to provide objective usability measures (e.g. awarding points for collected resources). The goal of the game is to convey the functioning of pheromone based swarms (e.g. temporal and spatial emergence) and to train players in using the human-swarm interface efficiently. Being a complex topic, the visualisation of the simulation and the GUI have been designed with usability and user experience in mind. A user study has been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the simulation as well as usability and user experience. The results revealed that the users efficiency increased over time, proving that the presented pheromone based interface can be used to instruct swarms, and its usage can be conveyed by the presented application.