Crowd simulation is a transdisciplinary research theme by nature. Computer science is a natural contributor to this theme, especially the Computer Graphics community, with teams such as ours.
This community is attached to being able to evaluate the results of a simulation on the basis of an animation such as the one represented by the image above. The obtaining of such an animation is generally the result of a 2-step process where the global trajectories of movement are generated for each character, then the animation of its members is carried out to allow it to follow this trajectory naturally. While the problem of crowd simulation focuses on the first step, the quality of the final animation also depends on the second step.
ChAOS is a free and freely available tool to realize this second step of character animation. Our tool is based on the Unity engine with different objectives in mind: to free teams working on the theme of crowd simulation from building a character animation technique; to move towards a standardization of crowd simulation visualization techniques to facilitate their evaluation; to invite new researchers, including outside the Graphics community, to contribute more easily to the theme of crowd simulation.
Interested? Visit our page to download and try ChAOS: https://project.inria.fr/crowdscience/project/ocsr/chaos/
See also our demonstration video:
Want to learn more about crowd animation from global trajectories? Read our paper dealing with this problem:
Perceptual effect of shoulder motions on crowd animations
L. Hoyet, A.-H. Olivier, R. Kulpa, J. Pettré.
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 35 (4), 53. 2016.
