Virus Spread Simulation

INSPIRATION: We wanted to give back something for the society through my knowledge of game development and with the current pandemic, everything we hear and see is about the fear that people have about the virus. We wanted to reduce that fear by spreading awareness and knowledge so through the medium of games I made this simulation.

LEARNING: A simulation depicting the spread of a virus pandemic situation and how social distancing practices can curb the spread and help flatten the curve.I ran the simulation with 500 people and checked the rate of how fast it spreads with social distancing and without it.

BUILT USING: My teammate Rohini Kanungo who handled the game analytics part , we first analyzed the real time data on coronavirus spread over the world ,created visualization on the same to arrive at the conclusion that for the countries who did not practice social distancing the unstrained multiplication of confirmed cases each day had increased drastically. From this, I had all the data required for doing the simulation. I started with only one case of social distancing to curb the spread and worked on it using unreal engine's AI system (behavior trees, AI perception, EQS).

CHALLENGES FACED: Challenges we ran into were undestanding and implementing the concepts of ue4. Another major challenge was running more than 1000 characters at a time. I reduced the texture quality and engine quality to make it smooth. Now it runs smooth with 1000 characters on screen at one time

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Accomplishments that we're proud of is we got a complete working simulation with values that can be tweaked. The curve vaguely represents real world data and can be tuned in better by including additional other data

What we learned was how important social distancing is in curbing the spread of the virus and can actually flatten the curve.

What's next for Virus Spread Simulation: If the project garners interest, I can add more data like age factor and get data on how many people might die eventually due to the virus and get data on how many deaths were in which group. Other data like the R0 factor and also data like how vaccines provided at aparticular time can cure people. I can also add a scenario of recovery rate of the virus.