Building and populating a Virtual City

1
Seminar by Carol OSullivan Associate
Professor Acting Head, Dept. of Computer
Science, Trinity College Dublin
Building and populating a Virtual City
Carol O'Sullivan is an Associate Professor and
acting head of the Computer Science department in
Trinity College Dublin. From July 2007, she will
be Dean of Graduate Studies for TCD. 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
about 90 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.
Abstract In this talk I will present an overview
of ongoing work in Trinity College Dublin on
developing a "Virtual Dublin" with large-scale
crowds. The development of the city model to
date, along with the issues involved in
navigating it in real-time will be presented. I
will also discuss our recently funded SFI-funded
project 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.
Thursday, 17th May, 2007 _at_ 4pm in the Hume
Building Conference Room, Third Floor
Check http//ncg.nuim.ie/ for details