Mass-interaction model of emergent collective phenomena

International audienceThis paper is a position paper on the concepts of emergence and individual / collective paradox, from both philosophical and experimental point of view. It presents successively: (1) some sociological and philosophical issues related to collective emergent behaviors; (2) a non-conventional point of view of physical mass-interaction modeling as a cellular automata system; (3) a proposition of a generic physical mass-interaction model for emergent collective phenomena able to render the main expected figures of non-deliberative emergent collective phenomena as those that define crowd behaviors

Collision detection: review of methods and recent advances in crowd simulation

Crowd simulation is a large complex system that visualizes the behavior of crowd entities' movement and their interactions with the virtual environment. Crowd model is usually integrated into a virtual environment to make the environment alive. In the context of agent-based simulation (as in crowd simulation), it encompasses collision checking between moving agents that are present in the same environment. Hence, it is important to design an efficient and yet effective collision detection in crowd simulation. This is to ensure that it is cost effective toward computational processing usage and still produce a believable behavior. This paper presents a study of collision detection techniques in crowd models, and recent advancement to accelerate the process so that in turn, these efforts could also improve the performance and outcome of crowd model in virtual environment applications

Enaction and Visual Arts : Towards Dynamic Instrumental Visual Arts

International audienceThis paper is a theoretical paper that presents how the concept of Enaction, centerd on action and interaction paradigm, coupled with the new properties of the contemporary computer tools is able to provoke deep changes in arts. It examines how this concept accompanies the historical trends in Musical, Visual and Choreographic Arts. It enumerates the new correlated fundamental questions, scientific as well as artistic, the author identifies. After that, it focuses on Dynamic Visual Arts, trying to elicit the revolution brought by these deep conceptual and technological changes. It assumes that the contemporary conditions shift the art of visual motion from a ''Kinema'' to a ''Dyname'', allowing artists ''to play images'' as ''to play violin'', and that this shift could not appear before our era. It illustrates these new historical possibilities by some examples developed by the scientific and artistic works of the author and her co- workers. In conclusion, it assumes that this shift could open the door to a new genuine connection between arts that believed to cooperate but that remained separated during ages: music, dance and animation. This possible new ALLIANCE could lead the society to consider a new type of arts, we want to call ''Dynamic Instrumental Arts'', which will be really multisensorial: simultaneously Musical, Gestural and Visual

Agent-Based Simulation Of Crowd At The Tawaf Area.

Every year during the Hajj season there is a concentration of more than two million people within the vicinity of the Masjid Al-Haram. Congested areas, such as the tawaf,, may reach beyond a safe level of four people per square meter during this peak period. The Tawaf area together with the Ottoman construction is able to accommodate up to 72,000 people (in a praying position). Simulation of the movement and behavior of such a huge crowd can be useful in managing this important event. One of the recent trends in modeling and simulation is the agent technology which has been used to model and simulate various phenomenon such as the study of land use, infectious disease modeling, economic and business study, urban dynamic and also pedestrian modeling. In this paper we use multi-agent based method to simulate the crowd at the Tawaf area. We present the architecture of the software platform which implements our proposed model and briefly report our early experience in using- Repast J which is an agent-based simulation toolkit to model the crowd at the area

A Synthetic-Vision Based Steering Approach for Crowd Simulation

International audienceIn the everyday exercise of controlling their locomotion, humans rely on their optic flow of the perceived environment to achieve collision-free navigation. In crowds, in spite of the complexity of the environment made of numerous obstacles, humans demonstrate remarkable capacities in avoiding collisions. Cognitive science work on human locomotion states that relatively succinct information is extracted from the optic flow to achieve safe locomotion. In this paper, we explore a novel vision-based approach of collision avoidance between walkers that fits the requirements of interactive crowd simulation. By simulating humans based on cognitive science results, we detect future collisions as well as the level of danger from visual stimuli. The motor-response is twofold: a reorientation strategy prevents future collision, whereas a deceleration strategy prevents imminent collisions. Several examples of our simulation results show that the emergence of self-organized patterns of walkers is reinforced using our approach. The emergent phenomena are visually appealing. More importantly, they improve the overall efficiency of the walkers' traffic and avoid improbable locking situations