Section: Application Domains

Crowds

Crowd simulation is a very active and concurrent domain. Various disciplines are interested in crowds modeling and simulation: Mathematics, Cognitive Sciences, Physics, Computer Graphics, etc. The reason for this large interest is that crowd simulation raise fascinating challenges.

At first, crowd can be first seen as a complex system: numerous local interactions occur between its elements and results into macroscopic emergent phenomena. Interactions are of various nature and are undergoing various factors as well. Physical factors are crucial as a crowd gathers by definition numerous moving people with a certain level of density. But sociological, cultural and psychological factors are important as well, since crowd behavior is deeply changed from country to country, or depending on the considered situations.

On the computational point of view, crowd push traditional simulation algorithms to their limit. An element of a crowd is subject to interact with any other element belonging the same crowd, a naive simulation algorithm has a quadratic complexity. Specific strategies are set to face such a difficulty: level-of-detail techniques enable scaling large crowd simulation and reach real-time solutions.

MimeTIC is an international key contributor in the domain of crowd simulation. Our approach is specific and based on three axis. First, our modeling approach is founded on human movement science: we conducted challenging experiment on the motion of groups. Second: we developed high-performance solutions for crowd simulation. Third, we develop solutions for realistic navigation in virtual world to enable interaction with crowds in Virtual Reality.