Crowd simulation plays a critical role in modern films, games, and architectural design. However, despite decades of algorithmic improvements, crowds use sub-optimal heuristics, are primarily constrained to 2D surfaces, and show few if any social dynamics. This dissertation proposes that a solution to these problems lies in altering how each agent perceives its environment as opposed to new obstacle avoidance algorithms. First, this dissertation presents a theoretical look at optimal agent movement. Next, in order to place crowds on arbitrary 3D manifolds, algorithms are proposed that change how each agent perceives its environment. The resulting crowds move naturally across a large range of surfaces with up to 100,000 triangles in real-time. Additionally, these algorithms are shown to work in real-time strategy game settings by using the GPU to determine which parts of the surface are visible to each agent. Results show that these algorithms can do visibility testing for up to 200 agents in real-time. Lastly, these same principles are used to create believable social dynamics with crowds based on the transactional analysis area of psychology. These social dynamics allow agents to stop and talk, pair walk, and have repeated social interactions. All this is done by changing how agents perceive the world based on their social reward.

The implementation of autonomous, flocking crowds of background characters in the feature film “Robots” is discussed. The techniques for obstacle avoidance and goal seeking are described. An overview of the implementation of the system as part of the production pipeline for the film is also provided.

Crowd simulation is used for many applications including (but not limited to) videogames, building planning, training simulators, and various virtual environment applications. Particularly, crowd simulation is most useful for when real life practices wouldn't be practical such as repetitively evacuating a building, testing the crowd flow for various building blue prints, placing law enforcers in actual crowd suppression circumstances, etc. In our work, we approach the fidelity to scalability problem of crowd simulation from two angles, a programmability angle, and a scalability angle, by creating new methodology building off of a struct of arrays approach and transforming it into an Object Oriented Struct of Arrays approach. While the design pattern itself is applied to crowd simulation in our work, the application of crowd simulation exemplifies the variety of applications for which the design pattern can be used. / Master of Science

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Crowd Simulation and Visualization are an important aspect of many applications such as Movies, Games and Virtual Reality simulations. The advantage with crowd rendering in movies is that the entire rendering process can be done off-line. And hence computational power is not much of an overhead. However, applications like Games and Virtual Reality Simulations demand real-time interactivity. The sheer processing power demanded by real time interactivity has, thus far, limited crowd simulations to specialized equipment. In this thesis we try to address the issue of rendering and visualizing a large crowd of animated figures at interactive rates. Recent trends in hardware capabilities and the availability of cheap, commodity graphics cards capable of general purpose computations have achieved immense computational speed up and have paved the way for this solution. We propose a Graphics Processing Unit(GPU) based implementation for animating virtual characters. However, simulation of a large number of human like characters is further complicated by the fact that it needs to be visually convincing to the user. We suggest a motion graph based animation-splicing approach to achieving this sense of realism. / Master of Science

M.Sc. (Computer Science) / The purpose of the research presented in this dissertation is to explore the use of a distributed multi-agent system in a general purpose crowd simulation model. Crowd simulation is becoming an increasingly important tool for analysing new construction projects, as it enables safety and performance evaluations to be performed on architectural plans before the buildings have been constructed. Crowd simulation is a challenging problem, as it requires the simulation of complex interactions of people within a crowd. The dissertation investigates existing models of crowd simulation and identifies three primary sub-tasks of crowd simulation: deliberation, path planning and collision-avoiding movement. Deliberation is the process of determining which goal an agent will attempt to satisfy next. Path planning is the process of finding a collision-free path from an agent‟s current location towards its goal. Collision-avoiding movement deals with moving an agent along its calculated path while avoiding collisions with other agents. A multi-agent crowd simulation model, DiMACS, is proposed as a means of addressing the problem of crowd simulation. Multi-agent technology provides an effective solution for representing individuals within a crowd; each member of a crowd can be represented as an intelligent agent. Intelligent agents are capable of maintaining their own internal state and deciding on a course of action based on that internal state. DiMACS is capable of producing realistic simulations while making use of distributed and parallel processing to improve its performance. In addition, the model is highly customisable. The dissertation also presents a user-friendly method for configuring agents within a simulation that abstracts the complexity of agent behaviour away from a user so as to increase the accessibility of configuring the proposed model. In addition, an application programming interface is provided that enables developers to extend the model to simulate additional agent behaviours. The research shows how distributed and parallel processing may be used to improve the performance of an agent-based crowd simulation without compromising the accuracy of the simulation.

Ever since the first use of crowds in films and videogames there has been an interest in larger, more efficient and more realistic simulations of crowds. Most crowd simulation algorithms are able to satisfy the viewer from a distance but when inspected from close up the flaws in the individual agent's movements become noticeable. One of the bigger challenges faced in crowd simulation is finding a solution that models the actual movement of an individual in a crowd. This paper simulates a more realistic crowd by using individual motion capture data as well as traditional crowd control techniques to reach an agent's desired goal. By augmenting traditional crowd control algorithms with the use of motion capture data for individual agents, we can simulate crowds that mimic more realistic crowd motion, while maintaining real-time simulation speed.

Recently, a considerable amount of research has been performed on simulating the collective behavior of pedestrians in the street or people finding their way inside a building or a room. Comprehensive reviews of the state of the art can be found in Schreckenberg and Deo (2002) and Batty, M., DeSyllas, J. and Duxbury, E. (2003). In all these simulation studies, one area that is lacking is accounting for the effects of human personalities on the outcome. As a result, there is a growing emphasis on researching the effects of human personalities and adding the results to the simulations to make them more realistic. This research investigated the possibility of incorporating personality factors into the crowd simulation model. The first part of this study explored the extraction of quantitative crowd motion from videos and developed a method to compare real video with the simulation output video. Several open source programs were examined and modified to obtain optical flow measurements from real videos captured at sporting events. Optical flow measurements provide information such as crowd density, average velocity with which individuals move in the crowd, as well as other parameters. These quantifiable optical flow calculations provided a strong method for comparing simulation results with those obtained from video footage captured in real life situations. The second part of the research focused on the incorporation of the personality factors into the crowd simulation. Existing crowd models such as HelbingU-Molnar-Farkas-Vicsek (HMFV) do not take individual personality factors into account. The most common approach employed by psychologists for studying personality traits is the Big Five factors or dimensions of personality (NEO: Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness). In this research forces related to the personality factors were incorporated into the crowd simulation models. The NEO-based forces were incorporated into an existing HMFV simulated implemented in the MASON simulation framework. The simulation results were validated using the quantification procedures developed in the first phase. This research reports on a major expansion of a simulation of pedestrian motion based on the model (HMFV) by Helbing, D., I. J. Farkas, P. Molnár, and T. Vicsek (2002). Example of actual behavior such as a crowd exiting church after service were simulated using NEO-based forces and show a striking resemblance to actual behavior as rated by behavior scientists.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T13:56:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 20 / Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda / Este trabalho apresenta um modelo para extrair informações do mundo real, capturadas com a utilização de técnicas de visão computacional, no que tange acompanhamento de indivíduos, com o fim de simular e validar comportamentos de multidões de humanos virtuais. Uma grande dificuldade ao se tentar reproduzir de forma realista (por meio de simulação) o comportamento de uma multidão em um determinado espaço é informar para o modelo de simulação todos os atributos necessários para descrever o movimento das pessoas virtuais. Além das características individuais e coletivas das pessoas poderem produzir uma grande variedade de comportamentos, tornando sua modelagem complexa, o espaço também contém restrições que podem interferir no comportamento das pessoas. Neste trabalho é proposto um modelo onde pessoas do mundo real têm suas trajetórias capturadas de forma automática. Numa etapa de pós-processamento, as trajetórias capturadas são utilizadas para gerar campos de vetores velocidade que serão utilizados para aux / This study presents a model to extract information from the real world using computer vision techniques. In particular, we use tracking algorithms to extract the trajectories of filmed people, aiming to simulate and validate the behavior of virtual human crowds.A great challenge when trying to reproduce in a realistic manner (by means of simulation) the behavior of a crowd in a determined space is to inform to the simulation model all necessary attributes to describe the movement of virtual people. Individual and general features of people can produce a great variety of behaviors, making its modeling complex. Furthermore, the space also contains restrictions that can interfere on people behavior. In this study it is proposed a model in which people from the real world have their trajectories captured in an automatic manner. In a post-processing step, captured trajectories are used to generate velocity fields that will be used to help in the calculation of virtual human movement, providing more realistic s

nÃo hà / Most recent crowd simulation algorithms equip agents with a synthetic vision component for steering. They offer promising perspectives by more realistically imitating the way humans navigate according to what they perceive of their environment. In this thesis, it is proposed a new perception/motion loop to steer agents along collision free trajectories that significantly improves the quality of vision-based crowd simulators. In contrast with previous solutions - which make agents avoid collisions in a purely reactive way - it is suggested exploring the full range of possible adaptations and to retain the locally optimal one. To this end, it is introduced a cost function, based on perceptual variables, which estimates an agentâs situation considering both the risks of future collision and a desired destination. It is then computed the partial derivatives of that function with respect to all possible motion adaptations. The agent adapts its motion to follow the steepest gradient. This thesis has thus two main contributions: the definition of a general purpose control scheme for steering synthetic vision-based agents; and the proposition of cost functions for evaluating the dangerousness of the current situation. Improvements are demonstrated in several cases. / Alguns dos algoritmos mais recentes para simulaÃÃo de multidÃo equipam agentes com um sistema visual sintÃtico para auxiliÃ-los em sua locomoÃÃo. Eles oferecem perspectivas promissoras ao imitarem de forma mais realista a forma como os humanos navegam de acordo com o que eles percebem do seu ambiente. Nesta tese, à proposto um novo laÃo de percepÃÃo/aÃÃo para dirigir agentes ao longo de trajetÃrias livres de colisÃes que melhoram significativamente a qualidade dos simuladores de multidÃo baseados em visÃo. Em contraste com abordagens anteriores - que fazem agentes evitarem colisÃes de maneira puramente reativa - à sugerida a exploraÃÃo de toda gama de adaptaÃÃes possÃveis e a retenÃÃo da que for Ãtima localmente. Para isto, à introduzida uma funÃÃo de custo, baseada em variÃveis de percepÃÃo, que estima a situaÃÃo atual do agente considerando tanto os riscos de futuras colisÃes como o destino desejado. SÃo entÃo computadas as derivadas parciais dessa funÃÃo com respeito a todas adaptaÃÃes de movimento possÃveis. O agente adapta seu movimento de forma a seguir o gradiente descendente. Esta tese possui assim duas principais contribuiÃÃes: a definiÃÃo de um esquema de controle de propÃsito geral para a orientaÃÃo de agentes baseados em visÃo sintÃtica; e a proposiÃÃo de funÃÃes de custo para avaliar o perigo da situaÃÃo atual. As melhorias obtidas com o modelo sÃo demonstradas em diversos casos.