CROwd Mapping: populating huge interactive environments – CHROME

The ChROMe project addresses the issues of populating large virtual environements. Populating an envrionment consists in incorparting crowds of inhabitants, cars, animals and other objects. The content is obviously dynamic: most of the entities are in motion. The content is complex: entities interact with each other and with the environment and the number of interactions to resolve follows a quadratic law. At last, an interactive environments represent a challenging context due to the necessity for any technique to compute, at interactive framerates, the evolution of the population and to render it on the screen. This project takes place in the practical and industrial context of interactive explorations of large virtual environments, in which credible animations of local populations are necessary in each location. The main objective of the ChROMe project is therefore to automatically populate large virtual environements with a credible variety of characters and an appropriate level of coherency in the locations at interactive framerates. The main output is to unlock the limitations of current simulation techniques generaly used in similar contexts.

The ChROMe project faces these challenges by building the contributions on a new paradigm: « crowd mapping ». The key idea behind the concept is to locally pre-define the qualitative animation of a piece of crowd, which is restricted both in space and in time, and to compose a global population by adding these pieces of crowds together. The partners of this project will exploit this paradigm by tackling simulatenously the following challenges: (i) scalability (animate the population of a whole territory rather than a district), (ii) expressiveness (relevance and variability of the individual behaviours) and (iii) conveyance of these crowds through the automated generation of cinematographic sequences. As such, the project contributes to potentially important shifts in the field on scientific problems which are generaly considered as difficult.