Abstract

Over the last decade there has been a large amount of work towards trying to simulate crowds for different applications, such as movies, video games, training, and evacuations. This course focuses on heterogeneous crowd simulation for interactive applications and will describe state of the art methods to simulate large groups of agents exhibiting a variety of behaviors, appearances and animations. We will present different techniques including psychological models and data-driven approaches that attempt to imitate real humans. We also present different systems to speed up both navigation, through multi-domain planners, and rendering, using per-joint impostors on fully animated 3D characters. Finally we provide quantitative and qualitative techniques to evaluate the quality of the simulated crowds, and include an overview of future research directions in the field.

Overview

You can download the course overview here.

1. Introduction (10 minutes): Our tutorial covers several topics for simulation of heterogeneous crowds with interactive behaviors. A brief description of each of the tutorial topics will be covered during this introduction, as well as a presentation of background of the other lecturers.
   Lecturer: Nuria Pelechano
   
   
2. Navigation (40 minutes)
   
   
• An overview of methods for local navigation between agents, focusing on a detailed coverage of selected recently proposed techniques (20 minutes).
  Lecturer: Stephen Guy.
  
  
• Revisiting representation and control for goal directed autonomous agents and multi-domain planning (20 minutes).
  Lecturer: Mubbasir Kapadia.
  
  
3. Heterogeneous Behavior (40 minutes)
   
   
• Functional crowds and psychological models (20 minutes).
  Lecturer: Jan Allbeck.
  
  
• Learning heterogeneous behaviors from real world data (15 minutes).
  Lecturer: Yiorgos Chrysanthou.
  
  
• Designing and authoring functional purposeful human characters in virtual environments, incorporating character animation, navigation and behavior (5 minutes).
  Lecturer: Mubbasir Kapadia.
  
  
4. Realism (40 minutes)
   
   
• Improving local movement and foot placement for real time crowds, followed by an overview of crowd rendering techniques to handle real time fully animated 3D characters that will enhance the overall appearance of the simulated crowds. (20 minutes).
  Lecturer: Nuria Pelechano.
  
  
• Statistical techniques to enhance and evaluate the realism of the crowd behavior (20 minutes).
  Lecturer: Stephen Guy.
  
  
5. Analysis and evaluation (40 minutes)
   
   
• Quantitative methods to evaluate crowd simulation (15 minutes).
  Lecturer: Mubbasir Kappadia.
  
  
• Qualitative evaluation of crowds through presence experiments. (10 minutes).
  Lecturer: Nuria Pelechano.
  
  
• Data-driven crowd evaluation. (15 minutes).
  Lecturer: Yiorgos Chrysanthou.

Course Notes

Course notes
Supplementary material
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