Analysis of the Influence of the Field of View on a Crowd Simulation Model Based on Synthetic Vision

Crowd Simulation is very important in many virtual reality applications, because it improves the sense of immersion of the users by making the population of agents in the environment to move as real crowds do. Recently, a model for simulating crowds, in which each agent is equipped with a synthetic vision system, has shown interesting results regarding the natural manner in which the agents navigate inside the environment thanks to their visual perception. In this article, we propose an upgrade to the agent´s visual system with a panoramic view in order to allow an agent to expand its vision beyond the limit of 180° imposed by the common projection provided by rendering APIs. Also, we analyze different parameters, which are used to define the field of view, to investigate the influence they have on the agent´s behaviour. The impacts the changes may cause on the efficiency of the algorithm are also analysed. A visible change on the agent behaviour is achieved by using the technique, with slightly loss of performance.