Levels of interaction: a user-guided experience in large-scale virtual environments

This paper investigates a range of challenges faced in the design of a serious game, teaching history to a player immersed in an 'open' virtual environment. In the context of this paper, such an environment is described as an exploratory, expansive virtual world within which a user may interact in a non-linear, situated fashion with both the environment and virtual characters. The main contribution of this paper consists in the introduction of the levels of interaction (LoI), a novel framework designed to assist in the creation of interactions between the player and characters. The LoI approach also addresses the necessity for balancing computational efficiency with the need to provide believable and interactive virtual characters, by allowing varying degrees of animation, display and, ultimately, interaction detail. This paper demonstrates the challenges faced when implementing such a technique, as well as the potential benefits it brings

Interaction with virtual crowd in Immersive and semi‐Immersive Virtual Reality systems

This study examines attributes of virtual human behavior that may increase the plausibility of a simulated crowd and affect the user's experience in Virtual Reality. Purpose-developed experiments in both Immersive and semi-Immersive Virtual Reality systems queried the impact of collision and basic interaction between real-users and the virtual crowd and their effect on the apparent realism and ease of navigation within Virtual Reality (VR). Participants' behavior and subjective measurements indicated that facilitating collision avoidance between the user and the virtual crowd makes the virtual characters, the environment, and the whole Virtual Reality system appear more realistic and lifelike. Adding basic social interaction, such as verbal salutations, gaze, and other gestures by the virtual characters towards the user, further contributes to this effect, with the participants reporting a stronger sense of presence. On the other hand, enabling collision avoidance on its own produces a reduced feeling of comfort and ease of navigation in VR. Objective measurements showed another interesting finding that collision avoidance may reduce the user's performance regarding their primary goal (navigating in VR following someone) and that this performance is further reduced when both collision avoidance and social interaction are facilitated

Modélisation et simulation du comportement de groupes sociaux de piétons avec des relations sociales hétérogènes

International audienceThe nature of the social relationship within a pedestrian group influences the group's structure and behavior and thus its entitativity (i.e. the perception of a group as a unit by other pedestrians). However, existing crowd models ignore the diversity of social relationships and have limitations in reproducing group avoidance behaviors. The proposed model is an adaptation of the social force model that addresses group social relationships. The approach is calibrated by comparing the distances and angles between members of the simulated groups with observations in real crowds. Results show that intra-group distances are a key factor in collision avoidance behavior. Simulation of collision avoidance shows that group members behavior fits better with empirical data than the original model and that individuals avoid splitting groups. By simply tuning the distribution of social relationships in the simulated crowd, the model can be used to reproduce crowd behaviors in several contexts

A Grid-Based Motion Planning Approach for Coherent Groups

This paper presents a novel motion planning approach for coherent groups with constant area, and it integrates C-L method into the probabilistic roadmap algorithm with sampling on the medial axis (MAPRM). In the preprocessing phase, the group is discretized into a grid-set which represents the configuration of the group. Then, a number of samples are generated on workspace by medial axis technique. These samples are extended into group’s configuration nodes of the roadmap using an extending strategy. Also, the group's deformation degree relative to the desired shape is introduced to improve the evaluation function. It gives users more flexibility to determine the respective weights of the group’s deformation degree and its distance to the goal in the query phase. After that, a novel local planner is constructed to connect any two neighbor configurations by using C-L method and the improved evaluation function. Experiments show that our approach is able to find paths for the coherent group efficiently and keep its area invariant when moving toward the goal

Fostering Engagement with Cultural Heritage Through Immersive VR and Gamification

Research on the I-Ulysses project was undertaken as part of the Digital Arts Humanities program between 2011 and 2015. An industrial/academic placement also took place in the third year, with the Computer Graphics Department (GV-2) at Trinity College Dublin, with Professor John Dingliana. During this placement, the author was given access to assets in Ogre from the Inside Joycean Dublin Project, a sister-project, and was tasked with gamifying them. The project was involved in a commercialisation spinout fast track (CFTD-1), with Enterprise Ireland’s Kevin Burke, in the third year, and the involvement of the Inagh Valley Trust.Digital games provide a recognised means of engagement and education when addressing challenges in educating and immersing individuals in their own heritages, and those of other cultures. Similarly, gamification techniques, commonly expressed as the addition of game elements to an existing process, have been successfully applied to augment existing resources and programmes. The many examples of gamification or serious games focusing on cultural heritage also highlight the potential benefits of using these principles for the purposes of supporting preservation and learning. In this chapter, we present I-Ulysses, a virtual-reality game designed to engage based around the notable work Ulysses by Irish author James Joyce. The rationale for the selection of Ulysses as a basis for the game’s content and design was two-fold; firstly because of its cultural impact within Ireland, and secondly as its content appeared well-suited to exploration as a virtual reality experience. Facets of gamification are explored in I-Ulysses through key mechanics, including a focus towards virtual worlds and crowd intelligence based on real-world data, to highlight how these principles can be employed for cultural heritage preservation and knowledge transfer. Through feedback obtained from focus groups interacting with I-Ulysses, it can be seen that the gamified mechanics presented through the lens of virtual reality provide an informative and educational guide to Ulysses that would engage and appeal to a wide audience

Modeling, Evaluation, and Scale on Artificial Pedestrians: A Literature Review

Modeling pedestrian dynamics and their implementation in a computer are challenging and important issues in the knowledge areas of transportation and computer simulation. The aim of this article is to provide a bibliographic outlook so that the reader may have quick access to the most relevant works related to this problem. We have used three main axes to organize the article's contents: pedestrian models, validation techniques, and multiscale approaches. The backbone of this work is the classification of existing pedestrian models; we have organized the works in the literature under five categories, according to the techniques used for implementing the operational level in each pedestrian model. Then the main existing validation methods, oriented to evaluate the behavioral quality of the simulation systems, are reviewed. Furthermore, we review the key issues that arise when facing multiscale pedestrian modeling, where we first focus on the behavioral scale (combinations of micro and macro pedestrian models) and second on the scale size (from individuals to crowds). The article begins by introducing the main characteristics of walking dynamics and its analysis tools and concludes with a discussion about the contributions that different knowledge fields can make in the near future to this exciting area

Crowd-Sourced Identification of Characteristics of Collective Human Motion

Crowd simulations are used extensively to study the dynamics of human collectives. Such studies are underpinned by specific movementmodels, whichencoderules andassumptions about howpeople navigate a space and handle interactions with others. These models often give rise to macroscopic simulated crowd behaviours that are statistically valid, but which lack the noisy microscopic behaviours that are the signature of believable real crowds. In this paper, we use an existing “Turing test” for crowds to identify realistic features of real crowds that are generally omitted from simulation models. Our previous study using this test established that untrained individuals have difficulty in classifying movies of crowds as real or simulated, and that such people often have an idealised view of how crowds move. In this follow-up study (with new participants) we perform a second trial, which now includes a training phase (showing participants movies of real crowds). We find that classification performance significantly improves after training, confirming the existence of features that allow participants to identify real crowds. High-performing individuals are able to identify the features of real crowds that should be incorporated into future simulations if they are to be considered realistic

Development of crowd simulation models using unity for immerssive VR applications

We develop a virtual reality application that simulates a lecture-type talk in a crowded room and an emergency evacuation taking place in it. We perform an experiment where we immerse five participants in our application, and we analyze their behavior

The design and simulation of traffic networks in virtual environments

For over half a century, researchers from a diverse set of disciplines have been studying the behaviour of traffic flow to better understand the causes of traffic congestion, accidents, and related phenomena. As the global population continues to rise, there is an increasing demand for more efficient and effective transportation infrastructures that are able to accommodate a greater number of civilians without compromising travel times, journey quality, cost, or accessibility. With recent advances in computing technology, transportation infrastructures are now typically developed using design and simulation packages that enable engineers to accurately model large-scale road networks and evaluate their designs through visual simulation. However, as these projects increase in scale and complexity, methodologies to intuitively design more complex and realistic simulations are highly desirable. The need of such technology translates across to the entertainment industry, where traffic simulations are integrated into computer games, television, film, and virtual tourism applications to enhance the realism and believability of the simulated scenario. In this thesis two significant challenges related to the design and simulation of traffic networks for use in virtual environments are presented. The first challenge is the development of intuitive techniques to assist the design and construction of high-fidelity three-dimensional road networks for use in both urban and rural virtual environments. The second challenge considers the implementation of computational models to accurately simulate the behaviour of drivers and pedestrians in transportation networks, in real time. An overview of the literature in the field is presented in this work with novel contributions relating to the challenges defined above