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

Quality of experience in telemeetings and videoconferencing: a comprehensive survey

Telemeetings such as audiovisual conferences or virtual meetings play an increasingly important role in our professional and private lives. For that reason, system developers and service providers will strive for an optimal experience for the user, while at the same time optimizing technical and financial resources. This leads to the discipline of Quality of Experience (QoE), an active field originating from the telecommunication and multimedia engineering domains, that strives for understanding, measuring, and designing the quality experience with multimedia technology. This paper provides the reader with an entry point to the large and still growing field of QoE of telemeetings, by taking a holistic perspective, considering both technical and non-technical aspects, and by focusing on current and near-future services. Addressing both researchers and practitioners, the paper first provides a comprehensive survey of factors and processes that contribute to the QoE of telemeetings, followed by an overview of relevant state-of-the-art methods for QoE assessment. To embed this knowledge into recent technology developments, the paper continues with an overview of current trends, focusing on the field of eXtended Reality (XR) applications for communication purposes. Given the complexity of telemeeting QoE and the current trends, new challenges for a QoE assessment of telemeetings are identified. To overcome these challenges, the paper presents a novel Profile Template for characterizing telemeetings from the holistic perspective endorsed in this paper

Perceptually plausible formations for virtual conversers

Recent progress in real-time simulations has led to a higher demand for believability from virtual characters. Background characters are becoming a more integral part of games, with emphasis being placed in particular on interactions between them. Conversing groups can play a significant role in adding plausibility, or a sense of presence, to a real-time simulation. However, it is not obvious how best to generate and vary these kinds of groups. In this paper, using anthropological standards for interacting distances and formations, we conduct a series of experiments to examine how these parameters inherent in human conversation are perceived for virtual characters. Our results show that, although participants were sensitive to both distance and orientation changes between talkers and listeners in a virtual conversation, they were not as sensitive to anomalous gesturing behaviours across different distances