Crowd Self Organization, Streaming and Short Path Smoothing

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.