Level-of-detail in behaviour of virtual humans

Abstract

An application featuring virtual humans is a program that simulates an artificial world inhabited by virtual people. Recently, only either small artificial worlds inhabited by a few complex virtual humans, or larger worlds with tens of humans, but performing only walking and crowding, are simulated. This is not surprising: a large world inhabited by complex virtual humans requires unreasonable amount of computational and memory resources. In this paper, we report on the project IVE, a common simulation framework for huge artificial worlds, pointing out the level-of-detail technique used at the behavioural level. The technique addresses the issue on reducing simulation demands by gradually decreasing simulation quality on unimportant places, while keeping the simulation plausible, with minimum scenic inconsistencies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.