🧪 Theater Theater Audience Simulation

This simulation models how a single moment on stage — a punchline, a curtain call, a dramatic reveal — spreads into a full audience reaction. Two hundred and eighty seated spectators, laid out across a raked theater floor, each carry their own hidden threshold for joining in. A stage cue delivers a direct stimulus that fades with distance from the stage, while each spectator also watches their immediate neighbors: once enough people nearby are reacting, the pull to join outweighs a spectator's own reluctance. The result is Granovetter's threshold model of collective behavior rendered as a literal wave of applause sweeping back through the house — tune how strong the cue is, how contagious the crowd is, and how uniform the audience's temperament is, then trigger a cue and watch the cascade unfold row by row.