Visualizing crowds in real-time

Abstract

Real-time crowd visualization has recently attracted quite an interest from the graphics community and, as interactive applications become even more complex, there is a natural demand for new and unexplored application scenarios. However, the interactive simulation of complex environments populated by large numbers of virtual characters is a composite problem which poses serious difficulties even on modern computer hardware. In this paper we look at methods to deal with various aspects of crowd visualization, ranging from collision detection and behaviour modeling to fast rendering with shadows and quality shading. These methods make extensive use of current graphics hardware capabilities with the aim of providing scalability without compromising run-time speed. Results from a system employing these techniques seem to suggest that simulations of reasonably complex environments populated with thousands of animated characters are possible in real-time.