Article

Scalable pedestrian simulation for virtual cities

Authors:

Soteris Stylianou,

Marios M. Fyrillas,

Yiorgos ChrysanthouAuthors Info & Claims

VRST '04: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology

Pages 65 - 72

https://doi.org/10.1145/1077534.1077547

Published: 10 November 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Most of the common approaches for the pedestrian simulation, used in the Graphics/VR community, are bottom-up. The avatars are individually simulated in the space and the overall behavior emerges from their interactions. This can lead to interesting results but it does not scale and can not be applied to populating a whole city. In this paper we present a novel method that can scale to a scene of almost any size. We use a top-down approach where the movement of the pedestrians is computed at a higher level, taking a global view of the model, allowing the flux and densities to be maintained at very little cost at the city level. This information is used for stochastically guiding a more detailed and realistic low level simulation when the user zooms in to a specific region, thus maintaining the consistency.At the heart of the system is an iterative method that models the flow of avatars as a random walk. People are moved around a graph of nodes until the model reaches a steady state which provides feedback for the avatar low level navigation at run time. The Negative Binomial distribution function is used to model the number of people leaving each node while the selected direction is based on the popularity of the nodes through their preference-factor. The preference-factor is a function of a number of parameters including the visibility of a node, the events taking place in it and so on.An important feature of the low-level dynamics is that a user can interactively specify a number of intuitive variables that can predictably modify the collective behavior of the avatars in a region; the density, the flux and the number of people can be selectively modified.

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Cited By

Martinez-Gil FLozano MGarcía-Fernández IFernández F(2017)Modeling, Evaluation, and Scale on Artificial PedestriansACM Computing Surveys10.1145/311780850:5(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3117808
Jordao KCharalambous PChristie MPettré JCani M(2015)Crowd artProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games10.1145/2822013.2822023(167-176)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2822013.2822023
Curran WAgogino ATumer KArnold D(2014)Hierarchical simulation for complex domainsProceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2576768.2598385(1087-1094)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2576768.2598385
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Scalable pedestrian simulation for virtual cities
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Computer vision
      1. Image and video acquisition
        3D imaging
  2. Computer graphics
    1. Animation

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

VRST '04: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology

November 2004

226 pages

ISBN:1581139071

DOI:10.1145/1077534

Program Chairs:
Rynson W. H. Lau
City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
,
George Baciu
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 10 November 2004

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VRST04

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VRST04: The ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 2004

November 10 - 12, 2004

Hong Kong

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Overall Acceptance Rate 66 of 254 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Martinez-Gil FLozano MGarcía-Fernández IFernández F(2017)Modeling, Evaluation, and Scale on Artificial PedestriansACM Computing Surveys10.1145/311780850:5(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3117808
Jordao KCharalambous PChristie MPettré JCani M(2015)Crowd artProceedings of the 8th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion in Games10.1145/2822013.2822023(167-176)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2822013.2822023
Curran WAgogino ATumer KArnold D(2014)Hierarchical simulation for complex domainsProceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2576768.2598385(1087-1094)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2576768.2598385
Normoyle ALikhachev MSafonova AKeyser JSander P(2014)Stochastic activity authoring with direct user controlProceedings of the 18th meeting of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games10.1145/2556700.2556714(31-38)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2556700.2556714
Navarro LCorruble VFlacher FZucker JGini MShehory OIto TJonker C(2013)A flexible approach to multi-level agent-based simulation with the mesoscopic representationProceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems10.5555/2484920.2484948(159-166)Online publication date: 6-May-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2484920.2484948
Dettmar TSeele SHerpers RBecker PBauckhage C(2013)Efficient Mesoscopic Simulations for Persistent Agents in 3D-Applications and Games2013 5th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES)10.1109/VS-GAMES.2013.6624227(1-8)Online publication date: Sep-2013
https://doi.org/10.1109/VS-GAMES.2013.6624227
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Ann Daniel ZNguyen Manh Hung Alexis DNguyen Hong Phuong (2012)Simulation of Emergency Evacuation of Pedestrians along the Road Networks in Nhatrang City2012 IEEE RIVF International Conference on Computing & Communication Technologies, Research, Innovation, and Vision for the Future10.1109/rivf.2012.6169853(1-6)Online publication date: Feb-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/rivf.2012.6169853
Navarro LFlacher FCorruble VSonenberg LStone PTumer KYolum P(2011)Dynamic level of detail for large scale agent-based urban simulationsThe 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 210.5555/2031678.2031717(701-708)Online publication date: 2-May-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2031678.2031717
Ahn JGobron SSilvestre QBen Shitrit HRaca MPettré JThalmann DFua PBoulic R(2011)Long term real trajectory reuse through region goal satisfactionProceedings of the 4th international conference on Motion in Games10.1007/978-3-642-25090-3_35(412-423)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-25090-3_35
Sang BMizuno KFukui YNishihara SNakajima MWu EMiyata KThalmann DHuang Z(2009)Introducing recognition ratios for urban traffic flow simulation in virtual citiesProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry10.1145/1670252.1670308(267-270)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1670252.1670308
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