The real-time simulation of human crowds has many applications. In a typical crowd simulation, each person ('agent') in the crowd moves towards a goal while adhering to local constraints. Many algorithms exist for specific local ‘steering’ tasks such as collision avoidance or group behavior. However, these do not easily extend to completely new types of behavior, such as circling around another agent or hiding behind an obstacle. They also tend to focus purely on an agent's velocity without explicitly controlling its orientation. This paper presents a novel sketch-based method for modelling and simulating many steering behaviors for agents in a crowd. Central to this is the concept of an interaction field (IF): a vector field that describes the velocities or orientations that agents should use around a given ‘source’ agent or obstacle. An IF can also change dynamically according to parameters, such as the walking speed of the source agent. IFs can be easily combined with other aspects of crowd simulation, such as collision avoidance. Using an implementation of IFs in a real-time crowd simulation framework, we demonstrate the capabilities of IFs in various scenarios. This includes game-like scenarios where the crowd responds to a user-controlled avatar. We also present an interactive tool that computes an IF based on input sketches. This IF editor lets users intuitively and quickly design new types of behavior, without the need for programming extra behavioral rules. We thoroughly evaluate the efficacy of the IF editor through a user study, which demonstrates that our method enables non-expert users to easily enrich any agent-based crowd simulation with new agent interactions.
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Over the past few years the tone of the debate around climate change has shifted from sceptical to soberingly urgent as the global community has prioritised the research into solutions which will mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. So far this research has been insufficient. One of the major problems for driving public and private stakeholders to implement existing solutions and research new ones is how we communicate about climate change (Stoknes, 2014). There seems to be a lack of common language that drives the scientific community away from policymakers and the public. Due to this lack, it is hard to translate findings into viable and sustainable solutions and to adopt new climate-neutral economies and habits.
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In this article, we call for a critical reflection on the lens that we adopt when researching journalism and communication. Adopting a lens of wonder can enhance our ability to consider the rich diversity that can be found in the field. Through a variety of research projects, we show how through wonder we cannot only understand how journalism is becoming but also make space for “becoming with”: we show how we are complicit in journalism’s future. Focusing on the paradoxical nature of journalistic practices as something we learned from our work with journalists, we illuminate and open up the much-at-onceness of journalistic life.
