Plausible Methods For Populating Virtual Scenes

We describe a series of experiments investigated the perception of urban crowds and the implementation of these results in a real-time crowd system. Our first series of perceptual experiments examined the role of context in locations containing pedestrian crowds, where properties of the location affect the formation of the individuals making up the crowd, i.e. their position and orientation. Our second set of experiments focussed on small groups of individuals. We considered group size and number of dynamic groups, and looked at body motions and audio desynchronisation of individuals in conversational groups. We also discuss the implementation of results from these experiments in a real-time crowd system.