Fast-Forwarding Crowd Simulations

The processing time to simulate crowds for games or simulations is a real challenge. While the increasing power of processing capacity is a reality in the hardware industry, it also means that more agents, better rendering and most sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods can be used, so again the computational time is an issue. Despite the processing cost, in many cases the most interesting period of time in a game or simulation is far from the beginning or in a specific known period, but it is still necessary to simulate the whole time (spending time and processing capacity) to achieve the desired period of time. It would be useful to fast forward the time in order to see a specific period of time where simulation result could be more meaningful for analysis. This paper presents a method to provide time travel in Crowd Simulation. Based on crowd features, we compute the expected variation in velocities and apply that for time travel in crowd simulation.