Automatic high level avatar guidance based on affordance of movement

Abstract

As virtual cities become ever more common and more extensive, the need to populate them with virtual pedestrians grows. One of the problems to be resolved for the virtual population is the behaviour simulation. Currently specifying the behaviour requires a lot of laborious work. In this paper we propose a method for automatically deriving the high level behaviour of the avatars. We introduce to the Graphics community a new method adapted from ideas recently presented in the Architecture literature. In this method, the general avatar movements are derived from an analysis of the structure of the architectural model. The analysis tries to encode Gibson’s 7 principle of affordance, interpreted here as: pedestrians are more attracted towards directions with greater available walkable surface. We have implemented and tested the idea in a 2x2 km2 model of the city of Nicosia. Initial results indicate that the method, although simple, can automatically and efficiently populate the model with realistic results.