Psychologically-based vision and attention for the simulation of human behaviour

Abstract

We describe a system designed to improve the simulation of human crowd behaviour by considering the visual perception and attention of each individual in the crowd. All of our techniques are based on psychology research; the ways this has been used are explained in detail. Our system runs in real-time, allowing quick experimentation with different ideas. The attention shifts for each actor, along with the associated gaze shifts, are controlled by a set of communicating agents. The agents can make requests for shifts of gaze and a gaze control agent sorts these according to priority. In our system each actor builds its own mental model of the world, based on its monitoring of other actors in the crowd. We argue that because we are using only the limited information from this mental model to decide the actor's behaviour, our simulation produces more realistic behaviour than previous work.