Towards urban crowd visualization

Abstract

Crowd simulation and visualization is an emergent research area that studies and reproduces this phenomenon on virtual environments. We present a system designed for simulation and visualization of pedestrians in urban environments, this system is focused on solving problems such as rendering, character animation, artificial intelligence to deal with steering behaviors and motion planning of each pedestrian. The present work incorporates steering pedestrian behaviors using real data collected from several sources such as GPS traces and surveillance systems, all these data allows virtual characters to adapt their navigation according to several environment factors such as other agents or obstacles. This kind of approach requires massive quantities of resources, such as data, memory and computation. We present a formulation that includes a multi-agent system that assigns individual characteristics, both physical and psychological to the virtual agents, which are based on data obtained from real pedestrians to better depict reality. The presented system is able to simulate crowds in complex urban environments; for that purpose the system was built in two stages, urban environment generation and pedestrian simulation, for the first stage we integrate the WRLD3D plug-in with real data collected from GPS traces, then we use a hybrid approach done by incorporating steering pedestrian behaviors with the goal of simulating the subtle variations present in real scenarios without needing large amounts of data for those low-level behaviors, such as pedestrian motion affected by other agents and static obstacles nearby.

On the Synergy between Virtual Reality and Multi-Agent Systems

“…Rivalcoba et al [103] presented a system for simulate and visualize pedestrians inside urban environments, the system includes a MAS that assigns physical and psychological characteristics to the virtual agents.…”

“…Regarding urban development, MAS are used to make realistic simulations of pedestrians, traffic objects, cars, etc., in this way improvements can be made in urban planning [103][104][105][106]. In the development of autonomous vehicles, multi-agent systems are used to create an interactive system to validate vehicles in the real world [107,108], in a way that reduces costs and avoids accidents.…”