Semantic crowds (original) (raw)
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Semantic crowds: reusable population for virtual worlds
2012
Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to realistic agent and group behavior through elaborate behavioral models, complex motion planning algorithms and impressive physics systems. As many crowd simulation solutions typically target only specific types of environment and scenario, a variety of special-purpose methods and systems has emerged that are hard to re-configure and re-use in other contexts.
Semantic Crowd Re-targeting: Implementation for Real-time Applications and User Evaluations
2021
Crowd simulation is the act of simulating and controlling the dynamic movement of large groups of virtual characters. Crowd simulation is traditionally a complex and time-consuming process, requiring extensive manual effort to achieve. On the one hand, commercial and liberally licensed tools tend to have many aspects of simulation tightly integrated which can be prohibitively difficult to re-configure, on the other, paying extras can be far more costly. In this context, the re-use of existing simulated crowds has been identified as a valuable cost-saving approach to crowd simulations. Previous approaches have investigated the use of environment semantics, but they have not been integrated with a commonly used simulation platform, rendering their usefulness limited. We present a novel approach to crowd simulation using an emergent system for re-targeting autonomous crowds and report on the findings of a problem discovery study, analyzing and establishing key aspects of functionality,...
Authoring Virtual Crowds: A Survey
Computer Graphics Forum, 2022
Recent advancements in crowd simulation unravel a wide range of functionalities for virtual agents, delivering highly-realistic, natural virtual crowds. Such systems are of particular importance to a variety of applications in fields such as: entertainment (e.g., movies, computer games); architectural and urban planning; and simulations for sports and training. However, providing their capabilities to untrained users necessitates the development of authoring frameworks. Authoring virtual crowds is a complex and multi-level task, varying from assuming control and assisting users to realise their creative intents, to delivering intuitive and easy to use interfaces, facilitating such control. In this paper, we present a categorisation of the authorable crowd simulation components, ranging from high-level behaviours and path-planning to local movements, as well as animation and visualisation. We provide a review of the most relevant methods in each area, emphasising the amount and nature of influence that the users have over the final result. Moreover, we discuss the currently available authoring tools (e.g., graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop), identifying the trends of early and recent work. Finally, we suggest promising directions for future research that mainly stem from the rise of learning-based methods, and the need for a unified authoring framework.
Crowd Simulation in 3D Virtual Environments
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016
Realistic animation of agents' activities in a 3D virtual environment has many useful applications, for examples, creative industries, urban planning, military simulation and disaster management. It is tedious to manually pre-program each agent's actions, its interactions with other agents and with the environment. Simulation is a good approach in this kind of domain since complex global behaviors emerge from the local interactions. We simulate a crowd movement using a multi-agent approach where each agent is situated in the virtual environment. An agent can perceive and interact with other agents and with the environment. Complex behaviors emerging from these interactions are from local rules and without any central control. These behaviors reveal the complexity of the domain without explicitly programming the system. In this work, we investigate (i) the navigation of the agents and (ii) the corresponding animations of each agent's behaviors. Simulation results under different parameters are presented and discussed.
WebCrowds: An Authoring Tool for Crowd Simulation
arXiv (Cornell University), 2022
Crowd simulation is an area of research largely used in the game industry. From the movement of a single NPC to the movement of an entire army, crowd simulation methods can be used to move agents through the environment while avoiding collisions with obstacles and between each other. Thus, it is important that game developers have access to crowd simulation tools that are both powerful and easy to use. In this paper, we present WebCrowds, an authoring tool for crowd simulation which can be used by anyone to build environments and simulate the movement of agents. The results achieved by our research suggest that WebCrowds is easy to use, delivers trustworthy simulation results, and can be used as an authoring tool for game developers who need to simulate crowds in their games.
Towards the agentification of a virtual situated environment for urban crowd simulation
IET Conference Publications, 2011
Research works in urban and crowd simulation tend to study systems, which are more and more complex, large and realistic. In such a case, the environment of the simulated system is a key concept which represents and manages the virtual world in which the agents are living. This paper starts from a modular object-oriented environment model, JaSIM, and proposes to agentify its components to enhance the modularity of the environmental model and its execution performances.
Crowd simulation for virtual environments in Unity
2015
Crowd simulation, die Simulation einer Masse von Akteuren, und speziell die Simulation von FußgängerInnen, wird in der Verkehrsplanung, der Architektur, der Gebäude- und Verkehrssicherheit sowie für Computeranimation in der Film- und Spieleindustrie eingesetzt. Die größten Herausforderungen liegen dabei (1) im realistischen Verhalten der Agenten, (2) im realistischen Aussehen und der Unterschiedlichkeit und (3) in einer benutzerfreundlichen Erstellung von Crowds. Die vorliegende Arbeit konzentriert sich auf das Verhalten der Agenten in Architektur-Kontexten. Zuerst wird der State-of-the-art auf dem Gebiet von Crowd Simulation in virtuellen Umgebungen zusammengefasst. Danach wird das Verhalten von FußgängerInnen durch Beobachtung im Westbahnhof, derzeit einem der beiden größten Bahnhöfe Wiens, analysiert. Ein agentenbasierter Ansatz wird verwendet, um mit Hilfe der Beobachtungen ein Verhaltensmodell zu erstellen, welches aus drei Ebenen (strategisch, taktisch und operationell) besteh...
2010
Agent-based crowd simulation has been widely applied in the analysis of evacuation safety under disastrous and terrorist circumstances. In crowd simulation, the virtual environment plays an important role in influencing human behavior and defining the scenario. The concepts of informed environment and smart objects have been adopted to improve the realism of the simulation by embedding semantic information in the environment. However, there is no formal approach of using these concepts in crowd simulation. In this paper, we propose a flexible and efficient framework of Intelligent Environment with Smart and Active Objects (IESAO). We properly define different types of entities and interactions, and describe the approach of modeling environment-related behavior in the intelligent environment. This framework gives a new perspective of modeling human behavior in the design phase. An implementation and a case study are discussed to show the flexibility and efficiency of this framework.
Scalable behaviors for crowd simulation
Computer Graphics Forum, 2004
Crowd simulation for virtual environments offers many challenges centered on the trade-offs between rich behavior, control and computational cost. In this paper we present a new approach to controlling the behavior of agents in a crowd. Our method is scalable in the sense that increasingly complex crowd behaviors can be created without a corresponding increase in the complexity of the agents. Our approach is also more authorable; users can dynamically specify which crowd behaviors happen in various parts of an environment. Finally, the character motion produced by our system is visually convincing. We achieve our aims with a situation-based control structure. Basic agents have very limited behaviors. As they enter new situations, additional, situation-specific behaviors are composed on the fly to enable agents to respond appropriately. The composition is done using a probabilistic mechanism. We demonstrate our system with three environments including a city street and a theater.
Virtual Crowds: Methods, Simulation, and Control
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Graphics and Animation, 2008
There are many applications of computer animation and simulation where it is necessary to model virtual crowds of autonomous agents. Some of these applications include site planning, education, entertainment, training, and human factors analysis for building evacuation. Other applications include simulations of scenarios where masses of people gather, flow, and disperse, such as transportation centers, sporting events, and concerts. Most crowd simulations include only basic locomotive behaviors possibly coupled with a few stochastic actions. Our goal in this survey is to establish a baseline of techniques and requirements for simulating large-scale virtual human populations. Sometimes, these populations might be mutually engaged in a common activity such as evacuation from a building or area; other times they may be going about their individual and personal agenda of work, play, leisure, travel, or spectator. Computational methods to model one set of requirements may not mesh well with good approaches to another. By including both crowd and individual goals and constraints into a comprehensive computational model, we expect to simulate the visual texture and contextual behaviors of groups of seemingly sentient beings.