Interactive Control of Real-time Crowd Navigation in Virtual Environment

Interactive control is one of the key issues when simulating crowd navigation in virtual environment. In this paper, we propose a simple but practical method for authoring crowd scenes in an effective and intuitive way. Radial Basis Functions (RBF) based vector field is employed as the governing tool to drive the motion flow. With this basic mathematical tool, users can easily control the motions of crowd by simply sketching velocities on a few points in the scene. Our approach is fast enough to allow on-the-fly modification of the vector field. Besides, the behavior of an individual in a crowd can be interactively adjusted by changing the ratio between its autonomous and governed rnovements.