Engineering simulation Film animation brings life to engineering simulation Through a partnership with Massive Insight, who first amazed audiences with unprecedented battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Aurecon can apply evidence-based engineering to help design precincts and urban spaces that focus on people, not only vehicles. Massive Insight has a flexible artificial life (Al) authoring environment for modelling the idiosyncrasies of complex, real-life behaviours into agents who use visual and auditory cues, as we do in real life. When it comes to simulation, engineers are experiencing a new level of expectation from their clients and other stakeholders in the design and build process. It used to be enough to have a two-dimensional model of robot-like agents moving through a space but today, engineers need to model a wide range of complex human behaviours in increasingly sophisticated environments and produce high quality 3D results. And of course, all stakeholders need to know that simulations are accurate, so that they can rely on them to prove that a given space will perform as intended. Massive Insight meets these goals by bringing movie quality animation within easy reach of every architect, while satisfying the demands of engineers for a very high degree of behaviour and motion fidelity. It is being achieved through the combination of unique artificial intelligence based agent technology and the Massive team’s unrivalled pedigree in the world of entertainment and media. One key differentiating characteristic of Massive Insight is that it employs an artificial life approach. The AI technology draws from the processes of nature rather than traditional simulation methodologies and Massive Insight agents act on their own behalf using the simulated natural senses of sight, hearing and touch. This provides for more inherently natural behaviour than those seen in existing engineering solutions. Massive Insight’s software experts, Stephen Regelous and Kevin Mannion explain how movie making is shaping a new level of visualisation in the infrastructure design and build process. From the very beginning it was clear that Aurecon and Massive shared a vision, where simulation of complex human behaviours is used to drive the design of public spaces and transport. The HUBid initiative demanded new capabilities, not available from traditional simulation solutions; therefore it was the perfect opportunity for us to work together. 14
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Disaster Management
How does the world of entertainment relate to engineering demands? Not surprisingly, the makers of multimillion dollar movies expect the very best and accept nothing less than superb results and over the years Massive Insight worked hard to meet their demands. As a consequence, their products are now well-known and widely respected and considered by many to be the best for accurately simulating complex, real-life movement and behaviour. Engineers share the same demands for realism and accuracy in simulations but they also have many additional needs, such as the ability to analyse data outputs, so they created Massive Insight using the same field-proven technology but with an engineering-specific set of features and user interface. This means that engineers can take advantage of the many years of investment in our simulation technology but in a package that is more suited to their needs. The platform and how it works Using Massive Insight, an engineer designs agents (people, for example) with a set of actions and reactions to what is going on around them. Massive agents act on their own behalf using the simulated natural senses of sight, hearing and touch. The reactions of the agents determine what they do and how they do it. Their reactions can even simulate emotive qualities such as happiness or weariness. Massive Insight is a system for designing and running such agents. When scaled up into the hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, the interaction id within the crowd that emerges from these individuals is highly realistic.
engineer to produce highly accurate simulations of complex behaviours. How does it help facilitate design decisions in real-life situations? With Massive Insight, designers of public spaces and transport can now accurately simulate a huge range of motion and behaviour. This means that designs can be tested to a considerably greater degree of accuracy than ever before, which greatly helps in getting the design right at the ‘drawing board’ stage. Designing, for example, an airport terminal becomes a much more informed process when there is a model simulating every nuance of human behaviour. The most exciting aspect of Massive Insight is its virtually limitless scope. With its capacity for simulating any and all types of human behaviour, it is expected to be used in an ever increasing number of innovative ways. Massive Insight has a flexible artificial life (Al) authoring environment for modelling the idiosyncrasies of complex, real-life behaviours into agents who use visual and auditory cues, as we do in real life. When it comes to simulation, engineers are experiencing a new level of expectation from their clients and other stakeholders in the design and build process. It used to be enough to have a two-dimensional model of robot-like agents moving through a space but today, engineers need to model a wide range of complex human behaviours in increasingly sophisticated environments and produce high quality 3D results. And of course, all stakeholders need to know that simulations are accurate, so that they can rely on them to prove that a given space will perform as intended.
How does this differ from traditional methods? Traditional crowd simulation tools often provided robot-like simulation, where all the agents had the same basic behaviours with very little deviation. This used to be acceptable in simple models, such as a straightforward simulation of commuters walking together to board a train but anything more sophisticated was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
Massive Insight meets these goals by bringing movie quality animation within easy reach of every architect, while satisfying the demands of engineers for a very high degree of behaviour and motion fidelity. It is being achieved through the combination of unique artificial intelligence based agent technology and the Massive team’s unrivalled pedigree in the world of entertainment and media.
Massive Insight enables the engineer to model a much wider range of agents, actions and reactions than previously possible. For example, people moving together in family groups, people with luggage or some other mobility impairment, people who have previous knowledge of their environment and those who are more dependent on signage and/or audio announcements. By pushing the boundaries of what can be simulated, Massive Insight helps the
One key differentiating characteristic of Massive Insight is that it employs an artificial life approach. The AI technology draws from the processes of nature rather than traditional simulation methodologies and Massive Insight agents act on their own behalf using the simulated natural senses of sight, hearing and touch. This provides for more inherently natural behaviour than those seen in existing engineering solutions. Volume 1
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