Crowd Navigation of Zoo Visitors based on an Animal-Morphing Portrait Shikakeology

In this research, we proposed a novel massive crowd navigation system for visitors in a Zoo. This is achieved through a Pokémon GO-like game with a Shikakeology, which is based on an animal portrait morphing technology. Shikakeology is a philosophy of designing triggers for changing user’s behavior. In addition, a visualization interface is developed for zoo managers to navigate visitors remotely in real time by using Google Maps. The managers can intuitively understand the distribution of visitors by the color and size of the 2D point clouds on the map. Furthermore, the managers can ease the traffic congestion of crowd in Zoo by sending them a quest, which may cause users to leave their current position in the hot zone. Through our game-like App on users’ smart phone, users can collect vivid and interesting personal animal portraits. To do this, first, they have to move into the area of certain animals. Then they can scan the QR-Code which is set in front of the cage/zone. The experiment result of our prototype system shown that our system can trigger user’s behavior change to solve the visitors’ navigation problems. Moreover, most of the visitors’ responses show that they have more fun and follow the tour suggestions of Zoo on their own will. This approach achieves a win-win situation.