Social-aware navigation in crowds with static and dynamic groups

Serious games with virtual characters heavily depend on character properties related to social interactions and awareness. This paper presents social-aware navigation for crowds in serious games. It enables a virtual character to join a group or navigate to a goal position through a crowd with static and dynamic group formations in a safe and socially acceptable way. The social-aware space is modeled in order to produce a speed map used by a fast marching method to find the fastest path to the goal position. We evaluate the method on a simulated scenario and public crowd datasets. Initial results show that social-aware navigation is capable of driving a virtual character to join a group or navigate to the goal in a realistic way while considering social norms and interactions.