Densely Populated Urban Environments

Overview

The aim of this project is to populate the 'dead' virtual cityscapes that are appearing in increasing numbers from labs and companies around the world. At UCL we also have one such model, it represents 160 square km of London. To populate it we need to simulate thousands of virtual humans (avatars).
Here we will look at various issues regarding rendering and behaviour simulation for these urban environments. Such as for example, collision detection, rendering of the animated avatars, improved illumination and simulation of pedestrian movement.
 

Researchers

Yiorgos Chrysanthou, principle investigator
Franco Tecchia, research fellow, funded by the EPSRC project GR/R01576/01
Celine Loscos, research fellow, funded on the equator IRC project
Ruth Conroy, research fellow, funded on the equator IRC project

Initial Results

We already have a basic system working. The following images are snapsots of the system. They show a small region of Central London which is populated with ten thousand avatars and run in real-time on a Pentium II PC.

 

Work in progress

Rendering: We are currently improving the quality of the rendering adding shadows and allowing the variety of the people.  

Papers