Simulating crowd interactions in virtual environments (doctoral consortium)

Understanding and modeling how a crowd behaves in a wide variety of situations is an important problem in many areas. For example, during the planning stages, city, traffic, and evacuation engineers use crowd behavior modeling to predict usage patterns and to do safety analysis of their designs. Several research areas benefit from realistic simulation of crowds such as augmented reality, animation, games, virtual therapy, and virtual training. Not only is a realistic rendering of a virtual environment required for these applications, but also a realistic simulation of virtual humans is essential to providing an immersive experience for the users. The goal of my research is to provide an interactive simulation of a crowd, where large numbers of human-like agents interact with each other. A large part of my research comes from understanding and observing what human-like behavior is and how it affects interactions with others and the environment. In this proposal, I discuss my approaches to model crowd behaviors with variation and dynamic changes.