Where Does All the Computing Power Go: Simulating Crowd Behavior

An army of orcs from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy

Source: "Crowd modeling: Model behavior," The Economist, March 5th 2009

The battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings were so good in part because the computer-generated imagery included as many as half a million virtual actors in a single shot, each not only pictorially right, but also because each one

was modelled as a software “agent” with its own desires, needs and goals, and the ability to perceive the environment and respond to the immediate surroundings in a believable way.

Now that technology is being used in a range of applications, from helping architects to design safer buildings (by realistically simulating occupant behavior when faced by an emergency), to planning train stations, to simulating crowd behavior when someone is injured.