Interactive formation control in complex environments

Henry, Joseph, Shum, Hubert P. H. and Komura, Taku (2014) Interactive formation control in complex environments. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, PP (99). p. 1. ISSN 1077-2626

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Abstract

The degrees of freedom of a crowd is much higher than that provided by a standard user input device. Typically, crowd control systems require multiple passes to design crowd movements by specifying waypoints, and then defining character trajectories and crowd formation. Such multi-pass control would spoil the responsiveness and excitement of real-time control systems. In this paper, we propose a single-pass algorithm to control a crowd in complex environments. We observe that low level details in crowd movement are related to interactions between characters and the environment, such as diverging/merging at cross points, or climbing over obstacles. Therefore, we simplify the problem by representing the crowd with a deformable mesh, and allow the user, via multi-touch input, to specify high level movements and formations that are important for context delivery. To help prevent congestion, our system dynamically reassigns characters in the formation by employing a mass transport solver to minimise their overall movement. The solver uses a cost function to evaluate the impact from the environment, including obstacles and areas affecting movement speed. Experimental results show realistic crowd movement created with minimal high-level user inputs. Our algorithm is particularly useful for real-time applications including strategy games and interactive animation creation.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Animation, Artificial Intelligence, computer graphics, computing methodologies, distributed artificial intelligence, games, gaming, H.5.2.h input devices and strategies, information interfaces and representation (HCI), intelligent agents, interaction techniques, modeling, multiagent systems, simulation, three-dimensional graphics and realism, types of simulation, user interfaces and visualization
Subjects:	G400 Computer Science
Department:	Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Computer and Information Sciences
Depositing User:	Hubert Shum
Date Deposited:	10 Sep 2013 13:25
Last Modified:	02 Dec 2020 10:19
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/13495

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