Synchronization of walking “in the wild”

Marker-less video-based tracking promises to allow us to do movement science on existing video databases. We revisited the old question of how people synchronize their walking using real world data. We thus applied pose estimation to 348 video segments extracted from YouTube videos of people walking in cities. As in previous, more constrained, research, we find a tendency for pairs of people to walk in phase or in anti-phase with each other. Large video databases, along with pose-tracking algorithms, promise answers to many movement questions without experimentally acquiring new data.