The Visual Response Simulator | ViRS | is an agent-based modeling project designed to explore and visualize how disease dynamics and social behaviors interact over space and time. Originating as a thesis project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2018, ViRS is now a collaborative, cross-disciplinary research effort at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.This particular product from ViRS is a spatially abstract COVID-19 transmission study model. It aims to explore the potential level of impact public health interventions and social behaviors have on containing and stopping a COVID-19 outbreak within a population of agents.

Running Virs is pretty simple, you'll need to download two things

• The visual programming software Processing
• Download the file sketch_main.pde

Step by step process of downloading Processing

• Go to the processing download page
• Click on the relevant link - Windows 32 bit or Windows 64 bit for windows, or the one relevant to the operating system you are using.
• Your download should start, and will take a minute or two to get it done.
• Go to your the folder you downloaded the file to.
• Unzip the new file
• Go to the destination folder and double click “processing.exe”.
• Within a few minutes processing should open.

If you have any issues with our simulator please report to: http://virs.io/survey/

Virs.io is licensed by Harvard Humanatarian Initiative. For a list of copyright holders, please refer to AUTHOR Michael de St. Aubin.

• Michael de St. Aubin, HHI Project Lead
• Robert Pietrusko, GSD Professor of Landscape Architecture
• Zeerak Ammed, GSD Teaching Assistant
• Nipurna Dhakal, Computer Science Intern Clark University

Contact the project lead Michael de St. Aubin: [email protected]