Crowds videos

Minsh videos

Crowds

 Crowd Patches: Populating Large-Scale Virtual Environments for Real-Time Applications.

This video was created to demonstrate a paper published in the Proceedings of I3D 2009.
It demonstrates how we created patches that we can plug together, a little bit like dominoes, except that on the patches, we put virtual humans following pre-computed trajectories. The results we obtained were impressive and that's one of the projects I took part in that I'm the most proud of.

Ref:
Crowd Patches: Populating Large-Scale Virtual Environments for Real-Time Applications.
Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maïm, Julien Pettré, and Daniel Thalmann.
In Proceedings of I3D, 2009.






Unique Character Instances for Crowds.

This video was created to demonstrate a paper published in 2009 about the various methods we used to vary the appearance of virtual human crowds while using a very small set of templates.

Ref:
Unique Character Instances for Crowds.
Jonathan Maïm, Barbara Yersin  and Daniel Thalmann.
In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications Journal 2009 29(6): pp.82-90.
(see Publications)











Real-Time Crowd Motion Planning: Scalable Avoidance and Group Behavior.

This short video has been created to demonstrate our group behavior algorithm for crowds.

The results have been published as an extension of a previous paper describing a scalable collision avoidance algorithm for crowds (see Real-Time Scalable Motion Planning for Crowds video below).

Ref:
Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maïm, Fiorenzo Morini, and Daniel Thalmann.
In The Visual Computer 24(10): 859-870, 2008.









Populating Ancient Pompeii with Crowds of Virtual Romans.

This video was created in the VRLAB EPFL while I was a PhD candidate there. It was a project in collaboration with the ETH Zurich. The goal was to recreate a district of the Ancient city of Pompeii and populate it with crowds of virtual Romans.
It resulted in a great real-time demo where you could watch virtual Romans wandering and talking in the reconstructed city. The ETHZ took care of the city creation, while we simulated the crowd at the VRLAB.

Ref:
Jonathan Maïm, Simon Haegler, Barbara Yersin, Pascal Mueller, Daniel Thalmann and Luc Van Gool.
The 8th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage (VAST'07), Brighton, UK, November 26-30, 2007.




Real-Time Scalable Motion Planning for Crowds.

This video demonstrates the use of levels of details in  collision avoidance for crowds. We've used a mix of a potential field-based algorithm in regions close to the camera and a combination of Navigation Graphs (Pettré et. al 2006) and short-term avoidance techniques in farther areas.

Ref:
Fiorenzo Morini, Barbara Yersin, Jonathan Maïm and Daniel Thalmann.
In proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Cyberworlds, Hannover, Germany, 24-26 October, 2007.

Minsh

Happy Lagoon

Happy Lagoon is the latest game by Minsh. It has been release in August 2010 on both Facebook and Hi5.
In this game, you take care of your underwater pets by providing for their needs, and accomplish missions to obtain new species: turtles, dolphins, sharks, whales!

The game has been developed in AS3 and Flex4 with a PureMVC framework. To exploit our 3D content, we've used the Away3D lite plugin.












Minsh.net

A virtual world connected to Twitter.

The idea behind our first project was to allow social network users to visualize their connections in a whole new dimension: a 3D underwater world where each fish is a Twitter user.

Users could send tweets, discover new connections by exploring the ocean, and play tricks on their connections by transforming or coloring their fish. The live streaming of the fish information allowed users to interact in real-time.

This is a promising approach, for I really feel social networks ought to be visualized in 3D rather than the 2D text-based approach everybody's using today.