Crowd self-organization, streaming and short path smoothing

Abstract

Pedestrians implicitly cooperate by forming lanes inside dense crowd in order to facilitate flow and prevent complete passage blocking. Our aim is to re-enforce this self-organization phenomenon in dense crowd for the purpose of virtual crowd animation and navigation simplification. The mechanism of a flow grid is introduced to measure flow over an area. The flow grid is a perception mechanism of the surrounding area and favors dynamic lane formation (streams). It provides feedback to the navigation algorithm of the avatars, to enable them to choose a route that both meets their goal (wanted direction) and a trajectory that assists in self-organization of the crowd. A very simplified yet fairly effective navigation method suitable for dense crowds is also presented. It demonstrates that self-organization of the avatars can help in simplifying local navigation. The method produces short distance, intermediate positions ahead in time and, as a post-processing step, smoothes them out before the avatar needs to use them.