The impact of animations in the perception of a simulated crowd

Simulating virtual crowds is an important challenge in many areas such as games and virtual reality applications. A lot of effort has been dedicated to improving pathfinding, collision avoidance, or decision making, to achieve more realistic human-like behavior. However, crowd simulation will be far from appearing realistic as long as virtual humans are limited to walking animations. Including animation variety could greatly enhance the plausibility of the populated environment. In this paper, we evaluated to what extend animation variety can affect the perceived level of realism of a crowd, regardless of the appearance of the virtual agents (bots vs. humanoids). The goal of this study is to provide recommendations for crowd animation and rendering when simulating crowds. Our results show that the perceived realism of the crowd trajectories and animations is significantly higher when using a variety of animations as opposed to simply having locomotion animations, but only if we render realistic humanoids. If we can only render agents as bots, then there is no much gain from having animation variety, in fact, it could potentially lower the perceived quality of the trajectories.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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

Virtual humans: thirty years of research, what next?

In this paper, we present research results and future challenges in creating realistic and believable Virtual Humans. To realize these modeling goals, real-time realistic representation is essential, but we also need interactive and perceptive Virtual Humans to populate the Virtual Worlds. Three levels of modeling should be considered to create these believable Virtual Humans: 1) realistic appearance modeling, 2) realistic, smooth and flexible motion modeling, and 3) realistic high-level behaviors modeling. At first, the issues of creating virtual humans with better skeleton and realistic deformable bodies are illustrated. To give a level of believable behavior, challenges are laid on generating on the fly flexible motion and complex behaviours of Virtual Humans inside their environments using a realistic perception of the environment. Interactivity and group behaviours are also important parameters to create believable Virtual Humans which have challenges in creating believable relationship between real and virtual humans based on emotion and personality, and simulating realistic and believable behaviors of groups and crowds. Finally, issues in generating realistic virtual clothed and haired people are presente

Human movement and behaviour simulation using gaming software

The provision of urban transportation systems that are inclusive and allow full participation in society for older people and people with disabilities is an important aspect of urban sustainability. This includes improving the design of transportation interchanges where divers individual humans interact in a crowded area. Simulation is an example of a beneficial method that can be widely applied to visualise and understand the problems using virtual environments. This research focuses on the development of simulation tools to simulate human movement and behaviour in crowded areas. A video observational method was applied as an input to understand and analyse human movement and behaviour in the real world. Six hours of video recording were recorded at a multi-mode transportation system covering weekdays, weekend, peak and off-peak times. Almost 19,000 individual humans were observed and the behaviour that they exhibited can be divided into six different types (known as Moving Through, Move-Stop-Move, Queuing, Competitive, Avoiding and Passing Through) which were determined from three major human movement types of free, same and opposite direction. Object-oriented gaming software was used to simulate the human movement and behaviour in the virtual environment based on agent-based modelling. Six factors affecting human movement and behaviour in the real world including Personal Objective, Visual Perception, Speed of Movement, Personal Space, Crowd Density and Avoidance Angle or Distance were considered as the parameters for the virtual humans. Case studies considering free, same and opposite direction movement with multi-mode transportation systems, bottleneck and non-bottleneck situations were applied to validate the prototype software system

Crowd simulation: A video observation and agent-based modelling approach

Human movement in a crowd can be considered as complex and unpredictable, and accordingly large scale video observation studies based on a conceptual behaviour framework were used to characterise individual movements and behaviours. The conceptual behaviours were Free Movement (Moving Through and Move-Stop-Move), Same Direction Movement (Queuing and Competitive) and Opposite Direction Movement (Avoiding and Passing Through). Movement in crowds was modelled and simulated using an agent-based method using the gaming software Dark BASIC Professional. The agents (individuals) were given parameters of personal objective, visual perception, speed of movement, personal space and avoidance angle or distance within different crowd densities. Two case studies including a multi-mode transportation system layout and a bottleneck / non-bottleneck evacuation are presented

Modeling Family Behaviors in Crowd Simulation

Modeling human behavior for a general situation is difficult, if not impossible. Crowd simulation represents one of the approaches most commonly used to model such behavior. It is mainly concerned with modeling the different human structures incorporated in a crowd. These structures could comprise individuals, groups, friends, and families. Various instances of these structures and their corresponding behaviors are modeled to predict crowd responses under certain circumstances and to subsequently improve event management, facility and emergency planning. Most currently existing modeled behaviors are concerned with depicting individuals as autonomous agents or groups of agents in certain environments. This research focuses on providing structural and state-based behavioral models for the concept of a family incorporated in the crowd. The structural model defines parents, teenagers, children, and elderly as members of the family. It also draws on the associated interrelationships and the rules that govern them. The behavioral model of the family encompasses a number of behavioral models associated with the triggering of certain well-known activities that correspond to the family’s situation. For instance, in normal cases, a family member(s) may be hungry, bored, or tired, may need a restroom, etc. In an emergency case, a family may experience the loss of a family member(s), the need to assist in safe evacuation, etc. Activities that such cases trigger include splitting, joining, carrying children, looking for family member(s), or waiting for them. The proposed family model is implemented on top of the RVO2 library that is using agent-based approach in crowd simulation. Simulation case studies are developed to answer research questions related to various family evacuation approaches in emergency situations

Towards virtual communities on the Web: Actors and audience

We report about ongoing research in a virtual reality environment where visitors can interact with agents that help them to obtain information, to perform certain transactions and to collaborate with them in order to get some tasks done. Our environment models a theatre in our hometown. We discuss attempts to let this environment evolve into a theatre community where we do not only have goal-directed visitors, but also visitors that that are not sure whether they want to buy or just want information or visitors who just want to look around. It is shown that we need a multi-user and multiagent environment to realize our goals. Since our environment models a theatre it is also interesting to investigate the roles of performers and audience in this environment. For that reason we discuss capabilities and personalities of agents. Some notes on the historical development of networked communities are included

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Detection and Simulation of Dangerous Human Crowd Behavior

Tragically, gatherings of large human crowds quite often end in crowd disasters such as the recent catastrophe at the Loveparade 2010. In the past, research on pedestrian and crowd dynamics focused on simulation of pedestrian motion. As of yet, however, there does not exist any automatic system which can detect hazardous situations in crowds, thus helping to prevent these tragic incidents. In the thesis at hand, we analyze pedestrian behavior in large crowds and observe characteristic motion patterns. Based on our findings, we present a computer vision system that detects unusual events and critical situations from video streams and thus alarms security personnel in order to take necessary actions. We evaluate the system’s performance on synthetic, experimental as well as on real-world data. In particular, we show its effectiveness on the surveillance videos recorded at the Loveparade crowd stampede. Since our method is based on optical flow computations, it meets two crucial prerequisites in video surveillance: Firstly, it works in real-time and, secondly, the privacy of the people being monitored is preserved. In addition to that, we integrate the observed motion patterns into models for simulating pedestrian motion and show that the proposed simulation model produces realistic trajectories. We employ this model to simulate large human crowds and use techniques from computer graphics to render synthetic videos for further evaluation of our automatic video surveillance system