Simulation of large crowds in emergency situations including gaseous phenomena

Crowd animation and simulation have been widely studied over the last decade for many purposes: populating collaborative virtual environments, entertainment and special effects industry and finally simulating behaviors and motion of people in emergency situations for safety systems. This last topic is addressed in this paper. We propose an original enhancement of a well known physics-based animation model which allows to consider influence of gaseous phenomena such as smoke or toxic gases in the behavior of the crowd. In order to get real time performances we also propose an implementation of this framework on modern graphics hardware, which allows to simulate crowds of thousands individuals at interactive framerate.