Towards more Realistic and Efficient Virtual Environment Description and Usage

We treat in this paper two linked subjects underlying virtual environment description: topological abstraction, and the way its precomputed data can be accessed by autonomous agents. The topological abstraction we propose is composed of three hierarchical layers, the first being the subdivision cells graph, and the two others being successive groupings. Then, we highlight some preprocesses computable with abstraction in order to improve environment information accessibility, such as potential visibility sets.ion in order to improve environment information accessibility, such as potential visibility sets. Agents can then retrieve globally computed data to use them in an egocentric realistic way. Moreover, we constrained our model so that it is usable within the framework of microscopic crowd simulation. Thus, it is sufficiently realistic, very efficient in access time, and can handle small as well as large environments.