Crowd animation is a topic of high interest which offers many challenges. One of the most important is the trade-off between rich, realistic behaviors and computational costs. To this end, much effort has been put into creating variety in character representation and animation. Nevertheless, one aspect still lacking realism in virtual crowd characters resides in their attention behaviors. In this paper, we propose a framework to add gaze attention behaviors to crowd animations. First, we automatically extract interest points from character or object trajectories in pre-existing animations. For a given character, we assign a set of elementary scores based on parameters such as dis- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 tance or speed to all other characters or objects in the scene. We then combine these subscores in an overall scoring function. The scores obtained from this function form a set of gaze constraints that determine where and when each character should look. We finally enforce these constraints with an optimized dedicated gaze Inverse Kinematics solver. It first computes the displacement maps for the constraints to be satisfied. It then smoothly propagates these displacements over an automatically defined number of frames. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method and our visually convincing results through various examples.

In the context of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies, the use of immersion technologies to replace classical exposure could improve the therapeutic process. As it is necessary to validate the efficiency of such a technique, both therapists and VR specialists need tools to monitor the impact of Virtual Reality Exposure on the patients. According to previous observations and experiments, it appears that an automatic evaluation of the Arousal and Valence components of affective reactions can provide significant information. The present study investigates a possible solution of Arousal and Valence computation from physiological measurements. Results show that the dimensional reduction is not statistically meaningful, but the correlations found encourage the investigation of this approach as a complement to cognitive and behavioural study of the patient.

Abstract-This paper presents a solution to interactive navigation planning and real-time simulation of a very large number of entities moving in a virtual environment. From the environment geometry analysis, we deduce a structure called navigation graph, which is the base to our method. After the description of this structure, we introduce a set of algorithms dedicated to answer navigation queries with a set of various solution paths and to execute the planned navigation in an efficient manner. We equally demonstrate method performance and robustness over several examples.

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, we present a study, conducted over eight social phobic subjects, whose aim is to evaluate the efficiency and flexibility of virtual reality as a therapeutic tool in the confines of a social phobia behavioral therapeutic program. Our research protocol, accepted by the ethical commission of the cantonal hospices' psychiatry service, is identical in content and structure for each patient. This study's second goal is to use virtual exposure to evaluate objectively a specific parameter present in social phobia, namely eye contact avoidance, by using an eyetracking system. Analysis of our results shows a tendency to improvement in the subjects' feedback to specific assessment scales, which is correlated to the decrease of eye contact avoidance. The results show that the presented virtual reality exposure therapy protocol could be successfully applied to social therapy.