A benchmark for virtual camera control

Abstract

Automatically animating and placing the virtual camera in a dynamic environment is a challenging task. The camera is expected to maximise and maintain a set of properties — i.e. visual composition — while smoothly moving through the environment and avoiding obstacles. A large number of different solutions to the problem have been proposed so far including, for instance, evolutionary techniques, swarm intelligence or ad hoc solutions. However, the large diversity of the solutions and the lack of a common benchmark, made any comparative analysis of the different solutions extremely difficult. For this reason, in this paper, we propose a benchmark for the problem of virtual camera control and we analyse a number of different problems in different virtual environments. Each of these scenarios is described through a set of complexity measures and, as a result of this analysis, a subset of scenarios is selected as the core of the benchmark.