Real-Time Position-Based Crowd Simulation in WebGPU

Wayne Wu, Matt Elser, Ashley Alexander Lee

In this project, we focus on simulating massive crowd behavior in real time. Specifically, we came across this paper (2018) by Weiss et. al that uses Position-Based Dynamics to simulate large dense crowds at an interactive rate. While the paper was originally implemented in CUDA and Unreal Engine, we decided to use WebGPU for both simulation and rendering as a means to learn and understand a modern graphics API, while contributing a unique example to the early WebGPU community. As far as we know, this project is the very first crowd simulation in WebGPU and one of the first few in the web.

Check it out live! (WebGPU Required)

Or find out more on Github.