A natural language interface with casual users for crowd animation

Abstract

We develop an interface that bridges crowd simulation and natural language processing techniques so that casual users can produce crowd animation by text input. The interface adopts a parser and a tagger to analyze simple English sentences to convert them into intermediate data structures that encapsulate the essential elements of crowds. There are five stages: preprocessing, parsing input sentences, crowd generation, animation adjustment, and crowd animation. Our system supports basic behaviors including standing, walking, running, escaping, being attracted, and queuing. We conducted a user experience study to evaluate the interface. The results show that the interface is user-friendly for casual users to produce crowd animation.