The area of simulated human figures is an active research area in computer graphics, and Norman Badler's group at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the leaders in the field. This book summarizes the state of the art in simulating human figures, discusses many of the interesting application areas, and makes some assumptions and predictions about where the field is going.

Discussing issues and concepts relating to human factors in simulation, this book covers theory and application in fields such as space, ships, submarines, naval aviation, and commercial aviation. The authors develop and expand on concepts in simulator usage particularly specific characteristics and issues of simulation and their effect on the validity and functionality of simulators as a training device. The chapters contain in depth discussions of these particular characteristics and issues. They also incorporate theories pertaining to the motivational aspects of training, simulation of social events, and PC based simulation.

Simulate realistic human motion in a virtual world with an optimization-based approach to motion prediction. With this approach, motion is governed by human performance measures, such as speed and energy, which act as objective functions to be optimized. Constraints on joint torques and angles are imposed quite easily. Predicting motion in this way allows one to use avatars to study how and why humans move the way they do, given specific scenarios. It also enables avatars to react to infinitely many scenarios with substantial autonomy. With this approach it is possible to predict dynamic motion without having to integrate equations of motion -- rather than solving equations of motion, this approach solves for a continuous time-dependent curve characterizing joint variables (also called joint profiles) for every degree of freedom. - Introduces rigorous mathematical methods for digital human modelling and simulation - Focuses on understanding and representing spatial relationships (3D) of biomechanics - Develops an innovative optimization-based approach to predicting human movement - Extensively illustrated with 3D images of simulated human motion (full color in the ebook version)

Key Features: --

Derived from the conference submissions for the 2012 AHFE conference, this volume focuses on types of human-modeled technology. Topics include digital human model types, 3D scanning, human patterns in terms of physiological and psychological interactions, including human algorithms that aim to model human forms, interactions, and dynamics. It also covers validation of digital human modes and the exploration of future of human models. This book is for Human factors and ergonomics engineers, cognitive engineers, human computer interaction engineers, human performance modeling engineers, and students in related fields.

This book focuses on two issues related to human figures: realtime dynamics computation and interactive motion generation. In spite of the growing interest in human figures as both physical robots and virtual characters, standard algorithms and tools for their kinematics and dynamics computation have not been investigated very much. "Simulating and Generating Motions of Human Figures" presents original algorithms to simulate, analyze, generate and control motions of human figures, all focusing on realtime and interactive computation. The book provides both practical methods for contact/collision simulation essential for the simulation of humanoid robots and virtual characters and a general framework for online, interactive motion generation of human figures based on the dynamics simulation algorithms.

In this series of lectures, a distinguished group of international contributors from a variety of disciplines debate the current position of the recent achievements in engineering and computer science. (Technology & Industrial)