HuGoS: A Virtual Environment for Studying Collective Human Behavior from a Swarm Intelligence Perspective

Swarm intelligence studies self-organized collective behavior resulting from interactions between individuals, typically in animals and artificial agents. Some studies from cognitive science have also demonstrated self-organization mechanisms in humans, often in pairs. Further research into the topic of human swarm intelligence could provide better understanding of new behaviors and larger human collectives. This requires studies with multiple human participants in controlled experiments in a wide variety of scenarios, where a rich scope of possible interactions can be isolated and captured. In this paper, we present HuGoS—`Humans Go Swarming'—a multi-user virtual environment implemented using the Unity game-development platform, as a comprehensive tool for experimentation in human swarm intelligence. We demonstrate the functionality of HuGoS with naïve participants in a browser-based implementation, in a coordination task involving collective decision making, messaging and signalling, and stigmergy. By making HuGoS available as open-source software, we hope to facilitate further research in the field of human swarm intelligence.