Intuitive crowd behaviour in dense urban environments using local laws

In games, entertainment, medical and architectural ap-plications, the creation of populated virtual city environ-ments has recently become widespread. In this paper we want to provide a technique that allows the simulation of up to 10,000 pedestrians walking in real-time. Simulation for such environments is difficult as a trade off needs to be found between realism and real-time simulation. This paper presents a pedestrian crowd simulation method aiming at improving the local and global reactions of the pedestrians. The method uses a subdivision of space into a 2D grid for pedestrian-to-pedestrian collision avoidance, while assign-ing goals to pedestrians to make their trajectories smoother and coherent. Goals are computed automatically and con-nected into a graph that reflects the structure of the city and triggers a spatial repartition of the density of pedestrians. In order to create realistic reactions when areas become crowded, local directions are stored and updated in real-time, allowing the apparition of pedestrians streams. Com-bining the different methods contributes to a more realistic model, while keeping a real-time frame rate for up to 10,000 simulated pedestrians.