An initial study to assess the perceived realism of agent crowd behaviour in a virtual city

This paper examines the development of a crowd simulation in a virtual city, and a perceptual experiment to identify features of behaviour which can be linked to perceived realism. This research is expected to feedback into the development processes of simulating inhabited locations, by identifying the key features which need to be implemented to achieve more perceptually realistic crowd behaviour. The perceptual experimentation methodologies presented can be adapted and potentially utilised to test other types of crowd simulation, for application within computer games or more specific simulations such as for urban planning or health and safety purposes.