A Scalable Visualization System for Crowd Simulations

The visualization system of large-scale crowd simulations should scale up with both the number of visuals (views of the virtual world) and the number of agents displayed in each visual. Otherwise, we could have large scale crowd simulations where only a small percentage of the population is displayed. Several approaches have been proposed in order to efficiently render crowds of animated characters. However, these approaches either render crowds animated with simple behaviors or they can only support a few hundreds of user-driven entities. In this paper, we propose a distributed visualization system for large crowds of autonomous agents that allows the visualization of the crowd without adding significant overhead to the simulation servers. The proposed implementation can be hosted on dedicated computers different from the servers, and it takes advantage of the Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) capabilities. As a result, the performance evaluation shows that thousands of agents can be rendered without affecting the performance of the simulation servers. These results suggest that the design of the visual client allows to add multiple visuals for displaying large crowds. Keywords—Distributed simulation, parallel rendering