“Pedestrians in a box”: A comparison to hard discs

We analyse the behaviour of pedestrians in a set of controlled experiments in which subjects were asked to move continuously in a closed square area, a scenario that we name “pedestrians in a box”. Since the size of the area and the number of pedestrians were changed between experimental sessions, this scenario resembles the treatment of a gas in statistical physics. We define a few statistical observables and compare the dynamics of the system to a gas of hard discs, which results to be able to reproduce some aspects of crowd dynamics in the high density setting, and discuss the meaning of our findings.