Adding sociality to virtual pedestrian groups

Abstract

We present a new method, Social Groups and Navigation (SGN), to simulate the walking behavior of small pedestrian groups in virtual environments. SGN is the first method to simulate group behavior on both global and local levels. We define quantitative metrics to measure the coherence and the sociality of a group based on existing empirical data of real crowds. SGN is designed to let groups stay in coherent and social formations without explicitly modeling such formations. For groups of four, SGN generates between 13% and 53% more socially-friendly behavior than existing methods, measured over the lifetime of a group in the simulation. For groups of three, the gain is between 15% and 31%, and for groups of two, the gain is between 1% and 4%. SGN can be used with any existing global path planner and any existing path following method. Experiments show that SGN enables the simulation of thousands of agents in real time. Due to its flexible design, it can be easily integrated into a larger crowd simulation framework.

Crowd simulation for crisis management: The outcomes of the last decade

“…walking behavior (Jaklin et al, 2015) and Ruiz & Hernández's GPU-based implementation of the model (Ruiz & Hernández, 2019).…”

“…The environment was monitored in a simple way where each agent could observe free space rather than observing other agents. In contrast to BioCrowds, in 2015 Jaklin et al presented a method for the simulation of the walking behavior of small pedestrian groups (Jaklin et al, 2015), called Social Groups and Navigation. They defined the group coherence and sociality of a crowd by using a vision-based collision avoidance method (Moussaid et al, 2011) with some modifications and a SFM (Moussaïd et al, 2010).…”

Towards social behavior in virtual-agent navigation

“…Furthermore, SGN lets a group re-organize itself when coherence is lost during the simulation. In addition to our previous version 3) [7], SGN handles sub-groups for improved social behavior among group members that have to split up to re-establish their coherence. SGN handles both global and local aspects of the path planning pipeline to ensure coherent and socially-friendly group navigation.…”

“…The idea behind sub-groups during coordination mode is to let agents that are close to each other walk together until they reach the leader. In a previous version 2) of our method [7], we let agents walk individually during coordination mode, which yielded less convincing results. We believe that walking in sub-groups reflects real-world behavior more accurately.…”

A Case for Identity Hierarchies in Simulating Social Groups

“…We may also consider the empirical investigation of [23], which suggests an ellipse of minimum area shapes groups. [24] suggest a distinction between in-group cohesion and in-group sociality. Considering cohesion independently allows us to introduce agents' personal (identity) and social (identity) space requirements, e.g.…”