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Digital human modeling (DHM) progress worldwide will be much faster and cohesive if the diverse community now developing simulations has a global blueprint for DHM, and is able to work together efficiently. DHM developers and users can save time by building on each other's work. This paper highlights a panel discussion on DHM goals and strategic plans for the next decade to begin formulating the international blueprint. Four subjects are chosen as the starting points: (1) moving DHM into the public safety and internet arenas, (2) role of DHM in computer assisted surgery and automotive safety, (3) DHM in defense applications, and (4) DHM to improve workplace ergonomics.

Computational ergonomic analyses are often laboriously tested one task at a time. As digital human models improve, we can partially automate the entire analysis process of checking human factors requirements or regulations against a given design. We are extending our Parameterized Action Representation (PAR) to store requirements and its execution system to drive human models through required tasks. Databases of actions, objects, regulations, and digital humans are instantiated into PARs and executed by analyzers that simulate the actions on digital humans and monitor the actions to report successes and failures. These extensions will allow quantitative but localized design assessment relative to specific human factors requirements

Simulating human reach is still challenging when considering complex interactions with the environment. Standard approaches involve inverse kinematics (IK) methods and usually require a complete but exponential cost search in configuration space. In ergonomic applications, both “naturalness” and interactive performance are important. We describe a real-time, collision-free, sternum-rooted IK solution for an articulated human figure based on motion capture data, human strength models, and multi-joint coordination functions. Movement paths are discovered through spatial search in a partitioned workspace. The system generates natural collision-free reach motions in real-time. The resulting animations and statistics demonstrate the efficacy of this approach.

The earliest Digital Human Modeling systems were non-interactive analysis packages with crude graphics. Next generation systems added interactivity and articulated kinematic human models. The newest systems use real-time computer graphics, deformable figures, motion controllers, and user interfaces. Our long-term goal is to free the user as much as possible from interactive human model manipulation through direct understanding and execution of task instructions. We present a next generation DHM testbed that includes a scriptable interface, real-time collision-avoidance reach, empirical joint motion models, a versatile locomotion engine, motion capture and synthetic motion blends and combinations, and a smooth skinned scalable human model.