Moving Virtual Agents Forward in Space and Time

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for fast-forwarding virtual agents in crowd simulations that accounts for their paths, obstacles, other agents, and personality traits, enabling coherent and collision-free future positioning.

Contribution

It extends Bianco's model by incorporating personality and obstacle awareness, allowing agents to accurately jump forward in time and space while maintaining realistic behaviors.

Findings

Successfully fast-forwards agents along their paths avoiding collisions

Maintains agent personality traits during fast-forwarding

Integrates with 'Fog of War' systems for practical applications

Abstract

This article proposes an adaptation from the model of Bianco for fast-forwarding agents in crowd simulation, which enables us to accurately fast forward agents in time. Besides being able to jump from one position to another, agents are able to stay inside their track, it means, the new position is calculated taking into account the original global path the agent would follow, if not being fast-forwarded. Obstacles and other agents around are also taken into account when calculating the new position. In addition, we included a personality aspect on agents, which affect their behaviors and, also, be taken into account when jumping to a future time and space. We conducted some experiments to validate our model, which shows that it was able to indeed fast forward agents from a position to another, in a coherent time, sticking to a given global path while avoiding collisions. Finally, we present a use case, showing that our method can fit inside a "Fog of War" system.