Course: Modeling Individualities in Groups and Crowds

Abstract

Crowds are part of our everyday life experience and essential when working with realistic interactive environments. Domains of application for such simulations range from populating artificial cities to entertainment, and virtual reality exposure therapy for crowd phobia. We mainly focus on real-time applications where the visual uniqueness of the characters composing a crowd is paramount. On the one hand, it is required to display several thousands of virtual humans at high frame rates. On the other hand, each character has to be different from all others, and its visual quality highly detailed. Variety in rendering is defined as having different forms or types and is necessary to create believable and reliable crowds in opposition to uniform crowds. For a human crowd, variation can come from the following aspects: gender, age, morphology, head, kind of clothes, color of clothes and behaviors.