High Density Simulation of Crowds with Groups in Real-Time

Abstract: To simulate crowds of people is of great social interest and is also believed to be useful when analyzing situations involving denser crowds. Many simulators seen over the years have however been struggling with simulating larger number of people, often due to a computationally expensive collision avoidance step. Furthermore, many simulators seems to forget the fact that people tend to stick together in smaller social groups rather than walking alone. A simulator for high density crowds has nevertheless been implemented through modeling crowds as a unilateral incompressible fluid. Together with an integration of groups onto this approach, the obtained solution allows for real time simulation of up to 3000 virtual people. The impact of having groups in simulations has furthermore been set as the overall goal of the thesis and has been analyzed through observing the effects of groups in various scenarios. A smaller user study has also been conducted in order to gain perceptual insights of groups in various crowd densities. These have shown that groups have a smaller impact on the crowd flow, and do not put a larger strain on the performance of the simulation. Groups are further proved to be perceived differently in different densities, with a possible difficulty for scenarios in higher density.