A Multiscale Geospatial Dataset and an Interactive Visualization Dashboard for Computational Epidemiology and Open Scientific Research.

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continued to strike as a highly infectious and fast-spreading disease in 2020 and 2021. As the research community actively responded to this pandemic, we saw the release of many COVID-19-related datasets and visualization dashboards. However, existing resources are insufficient to support multiscale and multifaceted modeling or simulation, which is suggested to be important by the computational epidemiology literature.

Cognitive Path Planning With Spatial Memory Distortion.

Human path-planning operates differently from deterministic AI-based path-planning algorithms due to the decay and distortion in a human's spatial memory and the lack of complete scene knowledge. Here, we present a cognitive model of path-planning that simulates human-like learning of unfamiliar environments, supports systematic degradation in spatial memory, and distorts spatial recall during path-planning. We propose a Dynamic Hierarchical Cognitive Graph (DHCG) representation to encode the environment structure by incorporating two critical spatial memory biases during exploration: categorical adjustment and sequence order effect.

Heterogeneous Crowd Simulation Using Parametric Reinforcement Learning.

Agent-based synthetic crowd simulation affords the cost-effective large-scale simulation and animation of interacting digital humans. Model-based approaches have successfully generated a plethora of simulators with a variety of foundations. However, prior approaches have been based on statically defined models predicated on simplifying assumptions, limited video-based datasets, or homogeneous policies.

Assessing crowd management strategies for the 2010 Love Parade disaster using computer simulations and virtual reality.

Dense crowds in public spaces have often caused serious security issues at large events. In this paper, we study the 2010 Love Parade disaster, for which a large amount of data (e.g.

The interaction between map complexity and crowd movement on navigation decisions in virtual reality.

A carefully designed map can reduce pedestrians' cognitive load during wayfinding and may be an especially useful navigation aid in crowded public environments. In the present paper, we report three studies that investigated the effects of map complexity and crowd movement on wayfinding time, accuracy and hesitation using both online and laboratory-based networked virtual reality (VR) platforms. In the online study, we found that simple map designs led to shorter decision times and higher accuracy compared to complex map designs.

Gamification of Crowd-Driven Environment Design.

This article explores whether crowd-sourced human creativity within a gamified collaborative design framework can address the complexity of predictive environment design. This framework is predicated on gamifying crowd objectives and presenting environment design problems as puzzles. A usability study reveals that the framework is considered usable for the task.

Interactive Architectural Design with Diverse Solution Exploration.

In architectural design, architects explore a vast amount of design options to maximize various performance criteria, while adhering to specific constraints. In an effort to assist architects in such a complex endeavour, we propose IDOME, an interactive system for computer-aided design optimization. Our approach balances automation and control by efficiently exploring, analyzing, and filtering space layouts to inform architects' decision-making better.

A Networked Desktop Virtual Reality Setup for Decision Science and Navigation Experiments with Multiple Participants.

Investigating the interactions among multiple participants is a challenge for researchers from various disciplines, including the decision sciences and spatial cognition. With a local area network and dedicated software platform, experimenters can efficiently monitor the behavior of the participants that are simultaneously immersed in a desktop virtual environment and digitalize the collected data. These capabilities allow for experimental designs in spatial cognition and navigation research that would be difficult (if not impossible) to conduct in the real world.

Virtual Sensing and Virtual Reality: How New Technologies Can Boost Research on Crowd Dynamics.

The collective behavior of human crowds often exhibits surprisingly regular patterns of movement. These patterns stem from social interactions between pedestrians such as when individuals imitate others, follow their neighbors, avoid collisions with other pedestrians, or push each other. While some of these patterns are beneficial and promote efficient collective motion, others can seriously disrupt the flow, ultimately leading to deadly crowd disasters.

Evaluating and Optimizing Evacuation Plans for Crowd Egress.

Evacuation planning is an important and difficult task in building design. The proposed framework can identify optimal evacuation plans using decision points, which control the ratio of agents that select a particular route at a specific spatial location. The authors optimize these ratios to achieve the best evacuation based on a quantitatively validated metric for evacuation performance.

Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment.

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people.

ADAPT: The Agent Development and Prototyping Testbed.

We present ADAPT, a flexible platform for designing and authoring functional, purposeful human characters in a rich virtual environment. Our framework incorporates character animation, navigation, and behavior with modular interchangeable components to produce narrative scenes. The animation system provides locomotion, reaching, gaze tracking, gesturing, sitting, and reactions to external physical forces, and can easily be extended with more functionality due to a decoupled, modular structure.

Navigation and steering for autonomous virtual humans.

The ever-increasing applicability of interactive virtual worlds in industry and academia has given rise to the need for robust, versatile autonomous virtual humans to inject life into these environments. There are two fundamental problems that must be addressed to produce functional, purposeful autonomous populaces: (1)Navigation: finding a collision-free global path from an agent's start position to its target in large complex environments, and (2) Steering: moving an agent along the path while avoiding static and dynamic threats such as other agents. In this review, we survey the large body of contributions in steering and navigation for autonomous agents in dynamic virtual worlds.