Eurographics 2006 - Conference Webpage

T9Populating Virtual Environments with Crowds

Date:	Tuesday, 5th September
Time:	14:00-17:30
Location:	Tutorial Room 7 (HS 7)

Organizer: Daniel Thalmann, EPFL VRlab
Speakers: Daniel Thalmann, EPFL VRlab
Carol O'Sullivan, Trinity College, Dublin
Pablo de Heras Ciechomski, EPFL
Simon Dobbyn, Trinity College
Abstract: The course will explore essential aspects to the generation of virtual crowds. In particular, it will present the aspects concerning information (intentions, status and knowledge), behavior (innate, group, complex and guided) and control (programmed, autonomous and guided). It will emphasize essential concepts like sensory input (vision, audition, tactile), versatile motion control, and artificial intelligence level. The course will survey methods for animating the individual members that make up crowds. It will survey a variety of approaches, with a focus on how example-based synthesis methods can be adapted for crowds. It will also discuss agent architectures for scalable crowd simulation.

Speakers' Background

Daniel Thalmann: is Professor and Director of The Virtual Reality Lab (VRlab) at EPFL, Switzerland. He is a pioneer in research on Virtual Humans. His current research interests include Real-time Virtual Humans in Virtual Reality, Networked Virtual Environments, Artificial Life, and Multimedia. He is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds and member of the editorial board of the Visual Computer and 4 other journals. Daniel Thalmann was member of numerous Program Committees, Co-chair, and Program Co-chair of several conferences including IEEE VR 2000. He has also organized 5 courses at SIGGRAPH on human animation and crowd simulation. Daniel Thalmann has published numerous papers in Graphics, Animation, and Virtual Reality. He is coeditor of 30 books included the recent Handbook of Virtual Humans, published by John Wiley and Sons and coauthor of several books. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1977 from the University of Geneva and an Honorary Doctorate (Honoris Causa) from University Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse, France, in 2003.
Carol O'Sullivan: has been the leader of the Graphics group in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, since 1999, where she has managed a range of projects with significant budgets and successfully supervised many researchers. Her research interests include perception, virtual humans, crowds, and physically-based animation. She has been a member of many IPCs, including the SIGGRAPH papers committee, and has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers. Carol has presented at SIGGRAPH several times, most recently a paper on impostor techniques for crowd simulation in the 2005 SI3D session. She has organised and co-chaired several conferences and workshops, including Eurographics 2005, the SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation 2006 and the SIGGRAPH/EG Campfire on Perceptually Adaptive Graphics 2001.
Simon Dobbyn: is a postdoctoral researcher at the Interaction, Simulation and Graphics Lab in Trinity College Dublin where he recently finished his PhD entitled "Hybrid Representations and Perceptual Metrics for Scalable Human Simulation". His research interests include the real-time rendering of virtual crowds, level of detail, and perception.
Pablo de Heras': goal in life is optimizing real-time rendering and exploration of and interaction with large collections of objects such as crowds of humans. He is a PhD student under the supervision of professor Daniel Thalmann at EPFL, VRlab in Switzerland where he started in 2002. He did his Master thesis at Massive Entertainment a game company in Sweden. He has been working on realtime rendering of crowds, novel tools for interaction with crowds, dynamics interaction with characters and variety editing for human characters in crowds.