The TARDIS project aims to build a scenario-based serious-game simulation platform for NEETs and job-inclusion associations that supports social training and coaching in the context of job interviews. This paper presents the general architecture of the TARDIS job interview simulator, and the serious game paradigm that we are developing. 1 NEET is a government acronym for young people not in employment, education or training. 2 ec.europa.eu/eurostat 3

In a proposed methodology for modeling dynamic crowd scenarios, a video corpus informs the modeling process, after which the resultant animations undergo perception-based evaluation. The aim is to improve the crowd's visual plausibility rather than the simulation's correctness. A real-life crowd animation system demonstrates the methodology's practical application.

In this article, we evaluate the effects of position, orientation, and camera viewpoint on the plausibility of pedestrian formations. In a set of three perceptual studies, we investigated how humans perceive characteristics of virtual crowds in static scenes reconstructed from annotated still images, where the orientations and positions of the individuals have been modified. We found that by applying rules based on the contextual information of the scene, we improved the perceived realism of the crowd formations when compared to random formations. We also examined the effect of camera viewpoint on the plausibility of virtual pedestrian scenes, and we found that an eye-level viewpoint is more effective for disguising random behaviors, while a canonical viewpoint results in these behaviors being perceived as less realistic than an isometric or top-down viewpoint. Results from these studies can help in the creation of virtual crowds, such as computer graphics pedestrian models or architectural scenes, and identify situations when users' perception is less accurate.

Recent progress in real-time simulations has led to a higher demand for believability from virtual characters. Background characters are becoming a more integral part of games, with emphasis being placed in particular on interactions between them. Conversing groups can play a significant role in adding plausibility, or a sense of presence, to a real-time simulation. However, it is not obvious how best to generate and vary these kinds of groups. In this paper, using anthropological standards for interacting distances and formations, we conduct a series of experiments to examine how these parameters inherent in human conversation are perceived for virtual characters. Our results show that, although participants were sensitive to both distance and orientation changes between talkers and listeners in a virtual conversation, they were not as sensitive to anomalous gesturing behaviours across different distances.

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