Crowd Simulation | Virtual Reality
A Fully Immersive, Multi-Discipline VR Experience Powered by Pedestrian Simulation
Client
MTA | Arup
Industry
Transportation
Service
Pedestrian Simulation | Virtual Reality


When the MTA set out to revamp Grand Central-42nd Street Station, the design challenge wasn't just engineering, it was helping 400,000 daily riders feel the difference. Twin Axis Principal led the development of a fully immersive VR environment anchored by a MassMotion pedestrian simulation, giving designers and stakeholders an agent-level walkthrough of the station before a single wall was touched. Crowd flows, congestion hotspots, and wayfinding performance could all be tested in context. This drives real design decisions rather than assumptions. What set this engagement apart was the depth of cross-discipline integration. Architectural geometry from Rhino, lighting from DIALux, and wayfinding signage from Illustrator all converged in 3ds Max alongside acoustic recordings captured live inside the actual station, mapped to the agent's path through the virtual model. The result was a photorealistic, fully ambisonic experience rendered in Arup's SoundLab. Every discipline's work was unified into a single human-scale perspective. Wayfinding designers used the first-person walkthrough to validate and revise their signage plan against real crowd behavior in a spatially complex environment, producing a stronger final design before construction ever began. -------------------------------------------------------------- Data Stack: BIM | Pedestrian Simulations | Photometric Light | Spatial Audio | Unity3D

