06.12.04
Cars As Models
Week 1 in LA is over. I’ve just had a full week of dissecting hearts and learning about how we’re killing ourselves every minute with fatty food and cigarettes, and how much it hurts to fix that shit up later down the road. And then we go out every night for drinks and meat.
Driving around for several hours in LA, you notice cars. There are some really nice cars out here, and they’re becoming more distinct and personalized. This isn’t the ’70s, and homogenous boxcars are a thing of the past. Since I’ve been studying dynamic movement for the past year or so, it occurs to me that studying “car behavior” would be a good way to model human behavior, decision making, and dynamic interaction. When I studied people, we hooked up motion tracking sensors to their hands and their head and created a 3-point animation from the data. This was due to limitations in equipment, but also helped reduce complexity and made the analysis easier.
Cars don’t have hands or a head, but I think their driver’s behavior is expressed nonetheless. Everyone have a driving style - conservative, aggressive, swerving, etc. And driving is all about cognitive load and decision making. Do you merge to the left? How close do you trail the car in front of you?
As you can see, the traffic in LA is actually just a huge empirical study in decision making.
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