Places Everyone: Creating an Animated Background of
Human Activity

Creating virtual scenarios that simulate a human population with
typical and varied behaviors can be an overwhelming task. In
addition to modeling the environment and characters, tagging the
environment with semantic data, and creating motions for the
characters, the simulation designer also needs to create character
profiles for the population and link these character traits to
appropriate behaviors to be performed at appropriate times and
places during the simulation. At present, simulations either have a
limited number of character profiles or are meticulously hand
scripted. I'll describe an architecture, called CAROSA (Crowds
with Aleatoric, Reactive, Opportunistic, and Scheduled Actions),
that facilitates the creation of heterogeneous populations for
simulations by using Microsoft OutlookŪ, a Parameterized
Action Representation (PAR), and crowd simulator. The
CAROSA framework enables the specification and control of
actions for more realistic background characters in virtual worlds
such as buildings and cities, links human characteristics and high
level behaviors to animated graphical depictions, and relieves
some of the burden in creating and animating heterogeneous 3D
animated human populations.