An Overview of the HVE Developer's Toolkit 940923

A substantial programming effort is required to develop a human or vehicle dynamics simulator. More than half of this effort is spent designing and programming the user interface (the means by which the user supplies program input and views program output). This paper describes a pre-programmed, 3-dimensional (3-D), input/output window-type interface which may be used by developers of human and vehicle dynamics programs. By using this interface, the task of input/output programming is reduced by approximately 50 percent, while simultaneously providing a more robust interface. This paper provides a conceptual overview of the interface, as well as specific details for writing human and vehicle dynamics programs which are compatible with the interface. Structures are provided for the human, vehicle and environment models. Structures are also provided for events, interface variables, and the output data stream. By using these standardized structures, any compatible physics model (i.e., human or vehicle dynamics simulator) may be linked into the window interface to model and illustrate, using fully-rendered, 3-D scientific visualization, the kinematic and kinetic behavior of humans and vehicles within their environment.