A paradigm for controlling virtual humans in urban environment simulations

This paper presents a new architecture for simulating virtual humans in com plex urban environments. The approach is based on the integration of six mo dules. Four key modules are used in older to manage environmental data, sim ulate human crowds, control intel actions between virtual humans and object s, and generate tasks based on a rule-based behavior al model. The communic ation between these modules is made through a client/server system. Finally , all low-level virtual human actions are delegated to a single motion and behavioral control module. Our architecture combines various human and obje ct simulation aspects, based on the coherent extraction and classification of information from a virtual city database. This architecture is discussed in this paper, together with a detailed case study example.