An Investigation of an Example-Based Method for Crowd Simulations

Abstract: The problem of simulating a crowd to see how it would behave in certain situations or just to create a realistic-looking scene to be used in a movie or video game is important and complex, and there are many different methods to solve it. This project is primarily an investigation of the example-based crowd simulation method described in the article "Crowds by Example" by Lerner et al. In the article, traced video footage of crowds are used to create a data set. The simulation program continuously finds situations in the data set that resembles the current situations in the simulation and updates the simulation thereby. We implemented this for around 10 agents using Unity 3D. Example-based crowd simulations does not only, like some other types of crowd simulation methods (for example ORCA), take collision avoidance into account but also the more complex ways the human mind thinks and therefore does not always behave as one would predict. The main conclusion is that this method of simulating crowds has the potential to create more realistic simulations than other forms of crowd simulations. The downsides are that the time the program spends creating simulations can quickly get very high and to make realistic simulations a lot of video footage must be filmed and then traced.