• Mubbasir Kapadia

Prof. Mubbasir Kapadia has co-written a book (with M. Kallmann), entitled “Geometric and Discrete Path Planning for Interactive Virtual Worlds,” to be published by Morgan and Claypool.

This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques in path planning and navigation for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. It originated from a popular course presented by the authors at SIGGRAPH 2014. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of multi-agent simulations.

The covered topics create a useful resource relating to new directions of research in computer animation for students, researchers, and developers. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

More details at the publisher’s website: http://www.morganclaypoolpublishers.com/catalog_Orig/product_info.php?cPath=22&series=13&products_id=906