I’m slowly making my way through the stack of magazines that accumulated during the three weeks I was gone on my trip to Egypt. One surprising item that I discovered is an article in The Economist about the use of the Massive software developed for LOTR being used for practical, important real-world purposes.

I had known that Massive was getting wide use in film and television, but I was surprised to learn just how successful and widespread the applications have become:

The warmongering orcs depicted in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy are evil, unpleasant creatures that leave death and destruction in their wake. But if you find yourself in a burning building a few years from now, they might just save your life. That is because the technology used to make hordes of these menacing, computer-generated monsters move convincingly on screen turns out to be just what is needed to predict how crowds of humans move around inside buildings. Engineers and architects hope that they will be able to improve building safety by modelling how people behave in the event of a fire.

The simulation of the behaviour of crowds of people and swarms of animals (not just mythological ones) is also being applied to many other unusual situations, from designing better closed-circuit television (CCTV) security systems to managing the traffic of ships in harbours. The same technology has also been used to improve the understanding of archaeological ruins and to model entire ecosystems in order to design wildlife-management strategies.

As all fans know, Massive was invented by Steve Regelous to create realistic crowd scenes for the trilogy. The company is still based in Auckland, but the products are getting international use. One application is to protect people during fires:

Nate Wittasek, the leader of the Los Angeles Fire Engineering Group at Arup, an engineering firm, was one of many people impressed by the realism of the battle scenes. A former firefighter, he realised that the same technology might be just what he had been looking for to model how people behave during a blaze-something that is increasingly being incorporated into the design of large buildings. Using computational models of crowds, it is possible to set up various scenarios and evaluate how the occupants move through the building.

The trouble is that the software that is used to do this generally treats people like particles in a fluid, says Mr Wittasek. “It assumes people behave like water flowing through a pipe,” he says. “They move at constant flow rates, heading for the nearest exits. But that’s not realistic.” Human behaviour is in fact far more complex and often quite irrational. When fleeing a fire people will often try to retrace their steps and leave the building by the way they came in, rather than heading for the nearest exit-even if it is much closer.

Massive gives each figure a crude form of artificial intelligence, including goal-seeking behavior. Orcs may be trying to attack other or defend themselves, but a reprogramming of the same software can lead to other behavior. According to The Economist, “The result is Massive Insight, a software package that makes it possible to create agents and program their behaviour preferences using simple graphical tools.”

The program is still in the testing phase:

The software is still not quite ready for commercial use, but Mr Wittasek has been testing it using computer models of the newly redesigned Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and plans to do the same with the forthcoming Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi. So far this has just involved testing the software, says Mr Wittasek; the results have not been fed back to influence the buildings’ design. But it has demonstrated that the software does indeed work, and allows a range of different types of character to be modelled, from first-time visitors to the building (who are easily disoriented) to informed employees who can act as stewards and shepherd people to the exits. There is also a degree of random variation between characters of a particular type. “Their actions aren’t choreographed, so each time you run it you get different results,” says Mr Wittasek. This makes it possible to carry out timed evacuations and spot possible design problems that can hinder evacuation, he says. “It’s helping us to predict human behaviour, as opposed to predicting flow,” he says.

Other uses described in the article. The software has been applied to archaeological ruins, to simulate the behavior of people in buildings to find evidence concerning what they were used for. The program can also model animal behavior, leading to applications in conservation. It’s being used to model ship traffic in Hong Kong’s harbor to cut down on the 150 collisions a year that currently occur.

The Massive website has grown a great deal since the last time I visited it, and it’s quite fascinating to explore it. Take a look at the “Real World Simulation” page for more examples of how the technology is being used for a lot more than making movies. There’s also a neat page of news about the program. Increasingly, media schools have courses to teach aspiring filmmakers to use Massive, in case you’re interested in that possibility.

It’s one more example of how the trilogy’s impact has gone far beyond making a lot of money and delighting a lot of fans. If you hear someone dismissing LOTR as just a big Hollywood fantasy, you can point out that it may soon be helping save lives, prevent shipping accidents, conserve endangered species-and who knows what else, as Massive continues to innovate.