Visualizing Crowds in Real-Time

Real‐time crowd visualization has recently attracted quite an interest from the graphics community and, asinteractive applications become even more complex, there is a natural demand for new and unexplored applicationscenarios. However, the interactive simulation of complex environments populated by large numbers of virtualcharacters is a composite problem which poses serious difficulties even on modern computer hardware. In thispaper we look at methods to deal with various aspects of crowd visualization, ranging from collision detectionand behaviour modeling to fast rendering with shadows and quality shading. These methods make extensive useof current graphics hardware capabilities with the aim of providing scalability without compromising run‐timespeed. Results from a system employing these techniques seem to suggest that simulations of reasonably complexenvironments populated with thousands of animated characters are possible in real‐time. ACM CSS: I.3.7 Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Animation