Creating crowd variation with the OCEAN personality model

Most current crowd simulators animate homogeneous crowds, but include underlying parameters that can be tuned to create variations within the crowd. These parameters, however, are specific to the crowd models and may be difficult for an animator or naive user to use. We propose mapping these parameters to personality traits. In this paper, we extend the HiDAC (High-Density Autonomous Crowds) system by providing each agent with a personality model in order to examine how the emergent behavior of the crowd is affected. We use the OCEAN personality model as a basis for agent psychology. To each personality trait we associate nominal behaviors; thus, specifying personality for an agent leads to an automation of the low-level parameter tuning process. We describe a plausible mapping from personality traits to existing behavior types and analyze the overall emergent crowd behaviors. Copyright © 2008, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.