Foveated Animations for Efficient Crowd Simulation

Foveated rendering techniques have seen recent development with the advent of commercial head-mounted displays with eye-tracking capabilities. The main drive is to exploit particular features of our peripheral vision that allow optimizing rendering pipelines, which allows using less computational effort where the human visual system may be unaware of differences. Most efforts have been focused on simplifying spatial visual detail on areas not being focused on by adjusting acuity of shading models, sharpness of images, and pixel density. However, other perception pipeline areas are also influential, particularly in certain purpose-specific applications. In this paper, we demonstrate it is possible to reduce animation rates in crowd simulations up to a complete stop for agents in our peripheral vision without users noticing the effect. We implemented a prototype Unity3D application with typical crowd simulation scenarios and carried out user experiments to study subjects’ perception to changes in animation rates. We find that in the best case we were able to reduce the number of operations by 99.3% compared to an unfoveated scenario, with opportunities for developments combined with other acceleration techniques. This paper also includes an in-depth discussion about human perception of movement in peripheral vision with novel ideas that will have applications beyond crowd simulation.