Towards a Graphical User Interface for Exploring and Fine-Tuning Crowd Simulations

IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), pp. 160–164

Abstract

Simulating a realistic navigation of virtual pedestrians through virtual environments is a recurring subject of investigations. The various mathematical approaches used to compute the pedestrians’ paths result, i.a., in different computation-times and varying path characteristics. Customizable parameters, e.g., maximal walking speed or minimal interpersonal distance, add another level of complexity. Thus, choosing the best-fitting approach for a given environment and use-case is non-trivial, especially for novice users. To facilitate the informed choice of a specific algorithm with a certain parameter set, crowd simulation frameworks such as Menge [3] provide an extendable collection of approaches with a unified interface for usage. However, they often miss an elaborated visualization with high informative value accompanied by visual analysis methods to explore the complete simulation data in more detail - which is yet required for an informed choice. Benchmarking suites such as SteerBench [14] are a helpful approach as they objectively analyze crowd simulations, however they are too tailored to specific behavior details. To this end, we propose a preliminary design of an advanced graphical user interface providing a 2D and 3D visualization of the crowd simulation data as well as features for time navigation and an overall data exploration.

Authors 4

1. Andrea Bönsch Aachen Visual Computing Institute

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Visual Computing Institute,Germany

   Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

2. Marcel Jonda Aachen Visual Computing Institute

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Visual Computing Institute,Germany

   Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

3. Jonathan Ehret Aachen Visual Computing Institute

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Visual Computing Institute,Germany

   Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

4. Torsten Kuhlen Aachen Visual Computing Institute

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Visual Computing Institute,Germany

   Visual Computing Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Germany