Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds

To improve safety at mass events, an evacuation assistant that supports security services in case of emergencies is developed. One central aspect is forecasting the emergency egress of large crowds in complex buildings. This requires realistic models of pedestrian dynamics that can be simulated faster than real-time by using methods applied in highperformance computing. The results in terms of level of services and congestion areas are presented to the decision makers via a web interface.

Conversations are ubiquitous in inhabited spaces. The statistical distribution of dyadic conversations depends on several factors, including the time, the location of the participating agents, their spatial relationship, and the type of conversation in which they are engaged. The conversation types, flow, and duration will depend on agent attributes such as interpersonal relationships, emotional state, personal priorities, and socio-cultural proxemics. We present a framework for distributing and animating conversations among virtual embodied agents in a real-time simulation.

We present a new impostor-based representation for 3D animated characters supporting real-time rendering of thousands of agents. We maximize rendering performance by using a collection of pre-computed impostors sampled from a discrete set of view directions. Our novelty is that we use per-joint rather than per-character impostors. This offers more flexibility in terms of animation clips, as our representation supports any arbitrary pose. Thus, the impostor animation is not constrained to a small collection of pre-defined clips.

This paper describes how crowd density information can be used to guide a large number of characters through a crowded environment. Crowd density information helps characters avoid congested routes which could lead to traffic jams. The characters periodically replan their routes as the density values are updated. Our experiments show that we can compute congestion-avoiding paths for tens of thousands of characters in real-time.