TY - GEN
T1 - Simulating gait and structural effects of aging for improved diversity in virtual crowds
AU - Gunaratne, Chathika
AU - Wimalaratne, Prasad
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - In real human crowds, diversification is caused by many factors such as gender, age, skin color, clothing, walking style, psychology etc., yet most crowd simulation systems rely only on appearance related variables for diversification. This research explores improving crowd diversity by simulating the biomechanical effects of aging in humans within crowd characters. Simulated characters were reprogrammed to be able to predict their behavior through an aging parameter predictor using support vector regression respective to their age. Data from gerontology studies recording spinal curvature and walking pattern deterioration with age were used for training. A spatial diversity algorithm was designed and implemented to distribute the resulting variants evenly among each other. Evaluations were conducted to gauge the impact on the diversification of the crowd simulation. The results prove that simulating posture and walking pattern deterioration in older characters does significantly improve biomechanical diversity within a virtual human crowd.
AB - In real human crowds, diversification is caused by many factors such as gender, age, skin color, clothing, walking style, psychology etc., yet most crowd simulation systems rely only on appearance related variables for diversification. This research explores improving crowd diversity by simulating the biomechanical effects of aging in humans within crowd characters. Simulated characters were reprogrammed to be able to predict their behavior through an aging parameter predictor using support vector regression respective to their age. Data from gerontology studies recording spinal curvature and walking pattern deterioration with age were used for training. A spatial diversity algorithm was designed and implemented to distribute the resulting variants evenly among each other. Evaluations were conducted to gauge the impact on the diversification of the crowd simulation. The results prove that simulating posture and walking pattern deterioration in older characters does significantly improve biomechanical diversity within a virtual human crowd.
KW - Aging
KW - Crowd simulation
KW - Simulation
KW - Virtual characters
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84892651749&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CGIV.2013.13
DO - 10.1109/CGIV.2013.13
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84892651749
SN - 9780769550510
T3 - Proceedings - 10th International Conference Computer Graphics, Imaging, and Visualization, CGIV 2013
SP - 17
EP - 22
BT - Proceedings - 10th International Conference Computer Graphics, Imaging, and Visualization, CGIV 2013
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 10th International Conference Computer Graphics, Imaging, and Visualization, CGIV 2013
Y2 - 6 August 2013 through 8 August 2013
ER -