Project Geppetto is something we hope to release in a few months on Autodesk Labs. It's research on how to bring a level of realism to crowds that has been lacking from all existing systems. The first phase of this research is focused on pedestrians, and this update is simply about the issues with trying to get crowds to react “believably” when forced into difficult situations like intersections.

In this video, there is the challenge of two intersecting streams of people (moving at different rates) that must be “managed” to avoid collisions. For the most part, we’ve succeeded as you can see from the video. We have plans to improve on this, but you can see that it is already working pretty well. There are a lot of challenges in keeping the behaviors as natural as possible, which is why this remains a research effort. It’s going to take time to refine it to hold up in all the use cases we want to throw at it.

We’ll try to keep you updated as the research continues and we near the release of Project Geppetto.