Practical simulation of virtual crowds using points of interest

Abstract

We present a computational method that exploits points of interest (POIs) to generate realistic virtual pedestrians for a city model, i.e., a simulated crowd. Our method is validated using mobility traces collected longitudinally from a city-wide free and open Wi-Fi network in downtown Oulu, Finland. Analysing this data, we first construct a time-varying Origin-Destination matrix that describes how individual pedestrians in our city move at different times and places. We compare this ground-truth against a random pedestrian model to investigate how the latter underestimates or overestimates movement at various locations or times of day. By identifying these deviations, we can calibrate a wei..