Abstract: In this talk I will present our work to date on perceptually adaptive crowd rendering and animation, and also present research on some new crowd simulation initiatives in Trinity College Dublin's Graphics group. In particular, I will talk about Metropolis, a novel interdisciplinary project combining computer graphics, engineering and cognitive neuroscience research, where the aim is to apply principles of human multisensory perception to create the realistic, scalable and large-scale simulations of populated cities. Large crowds consisting of millions of people will be simulated, and we plan to introduce a high level of variety in animation, appearance and sound, inspired by perceptual models and metrics. Real meaning will be added to the simulations by endowing individual crowd members with appropriate, sentient behaviours that are based on cognitive and sociological models. Furthermore, realistic populace and traffic noise will be simulated, effectively propagated depending on environmental factors, and driven by psychoacoustic principles. The project will build upon TCD's ongoing Virtual Dublin project.

Short Bio: Carol O'Sullivan is an Associate Professor and acting head of the Computer Science department in Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests include computer graphics, perception, virtual humans, crowds, and physically-based animation. She has managed a range of projects with significant budgets and successfully supervised many researchers. She has been a member of many IPCs, including the SIGGRAPH and Eurographics papers committees, and has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers. She has organised and co-chaired several conferences and workshops, including Eurographics 2005, the SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation 2006 and the SIGGRAPH/EG Campfire on Perceptually Adaptive Graphics 2001.