A proposed methodology of bringing past life in digital cultural heritage through crowd simulation: a case study in George Town, Malaysia

One of the heritages can be denoting to the values of human activity in the past and its cultural oral narratives. To virtualize these heritages, it means to actualize the heritage into the digital content. When attempting to understand a particular cultural heritage site, the challenge here is that the connection to the past is non-existence due to insufficient historical information of the heritage sites. On the other hand, crowd simulation has been widely applied for the purpose of construction and reconstruction of tangible and intangible digital heritage. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to bring past life into digital cultural heritage and it would need the inclusions of the visual information of the surroundings and the people in the past. This paper also investigates the phase-by-phase methodology to deal with crowd simulation of different ethnic groups with heterogeneous behaviors in digital cultural heritage. The crowd is modeled and simulated based on the classical particle-based boid algorithm in virtual heritage environment that includes social behaviors of heterogeneous crowd transpired in an old trading port. With respect to bringing the past life into digital cultural heritage, microscopic based crowd simulation is applied to the complex case such as a multi-ethnic trading port, involving distinguished behavioral patterns through a heterogeneous crowd simulation method. In the simulation, a high-level control method, hierarchical state-machine and group formation model are introduced through inter-ethnic interactions formalism. The results of the assessment and validation have shown that the proposed schemes, models and methods have successfully been deployed in George Town, Malaysia through the proposed methodology. Such a simulation can be beneficial for virtual walkthrough and virtual museum applications. Through several investigations, the advantages of applying this approach in simulating the digital George Town are demonstrated as well as its potential for future developments are identified.