Research and education
Roland Geraerts is an Associate Professor at the Geometric computing group in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. There, he obtained his PhD on sampling-based motion planning techniques. In addition, he studied quality aspects of paths and roadmaps. His current research focuses on crowd simulation, and spatial and high-performance computing in games and virtual environments. Furthermore, he currently teaches a course on crowd simulation. Roland has organized the Creative Game Challenge and is one of the cofounders of the annual Motion in Games conference.
Valorisation and Outreach
He was involved in making simulations for the Grand Départ of the Tour de France, for Schiphol, and evacuation studies for Amsterdam with respect to three metro stations of the Noord/Zuidlijn in Amsterdam.
He and his team have created a simulation program, SimCrowds, which integrates their crowd simulation research into an interactive, user-friendly software. He has co-founded the startup uCrowds, which brings the software to the market. The software suite also includes the world's fastest interactive crowd simulation engine with 500.000 real-time agents on a consumer PC, and 1M+ in the cloud. The software is used for e.g. preparations of the Vuelta, evacuation studies for the Rotterdam beach, and simulations for the Utrecht city office to clarify the effects of social distancing on the building's capacity. In addition, simulations were used to determine how long it takes to go through the voting proces for the Dutch parliamentary elections. uCrowds is one of the winners of the 2020 Academic Startup Competition.
He's also researching user interaction in combination with interactive, augmented-reality table tops. In 2023, his team has delivered a crowd simulation table and collision avoidance experiments which are part of a permanent exhibition in the University Museum Utrecht.
Interactive crowd simulation table
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