Cellular Automata based Crowd Simulation of Mexican Wave

Animated crowds offer modern methods to show both social relationships and emotions to enhance plain virtual scenes. When animation is created by an artist, it is a hard and time consuming process, but allows to create impressive results. On the other hand, when results do not need to be artistically accurate, more automated techniques are in place. Our solution contributes to the second group and helps to create perceptually rich animations more automatically. Simulation used is based on cellular automata, that control motion of the crowd itself. Special definition of rules and behavior are needed and we discuss option with a simple visual system incorporated. We compare both methods in a sequence of crowd simulation performing mexican wave at a sport or a cultural event. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism ]: Animation—Virtual reality; I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: Applications