Norman I. Badler

This book tells the story of building digital virtual human models in the context of the background, choices, and occurrences that shaped the author's own involvement and personal evolution. Such digital models found motivating applications in engineering, anthropology, medical, and group simulation problems, and numerous connections to other disciplines informed and enriched their design, development, and deployment. This personal perspective on developments in the field is enhanced by extensive citations that provide pointers into relevant literature, recognize the contributions of co-authors and collaborators, and give external evidence for claims. Both academic and corporate interest in virtual beings has exploded in recent years, and while this book does not survey the current state of the art it is an essential window into how the field arrived where it is today. The technical discussions throughout the book are deliberately accessible with extensive references to the literature for further reading. This book will be of interest to readers who want to understand the history of virtual human beings, how they evolved, and especially how they must address numerous human characteristics to achieve any sense of "human-ness."

This book describes, from a computer science viewpoint the software, methods of simulating and analysing crowds with a particular focus on the effects of panic in emergency situations.The power of modern technology impacts on modern life in multiple ways every day. A variety of scientific models and computational tools have been developed to improve human safety and comfort in built environments. In particular, understanding pedestrian behaviours during egress situations is of considerable importance in such contexts. Moreover, some places are built for large numbers of people (such as train stations and airports and high volume special activities such as sporting events). Simulating Crowds in Egress Scenarios discusses the use of computational crowd simulation to reproduce and evaluate egress performance in specific scenarios. Several case studies are included, evaluating the work and different analyses, and comparisons of simulationdata versus data obtained from real-life experiments are given.

This book describes, from a computer science viewpoint the software, methods of simulating and analysing crowds with a particular focus on the effects of panic in emergency situations.The power of modern technology impacts on modern life in multiple ways every day. A variety of scientific models and computational tools have been developed to improve human safety and comfort in built environments. In particular, understanding pedestrian behaviours during egress situations is of considerable importance in such contexts. Moreover, some places are built for large numbers of people (such as train stations and airports and high volume special activities such as sporting events). Simulating Crowds in Egress Scenarios discusses the use of computational crowd simulation to reproduce and evaluate egress performance in specific scenarios. Several case studies are included, evaluating the work and different analyses, and comparisons of simulationdata versus data obtained from real-life experiments are given.

Though actively pursued by several research groups, the problem of providing a synthetic or surrogate human for an engineer or designer already used to Computer Aided Design techniques has been most comprehensively solved by Norman Badler's computer graphics laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania - one of the world leaders in the field of simulated human figures in computer graphics. For human factors engineers, this book provides current knowledge of how a computer graphics surrogate human can augment their analyses of designed environments; for design engineers it presents the cutting edge in human figure modelling and hence human-centred design and for the computer graphics community it presents a major research effort in the interactive control of articulated human figures. This book constitutes the state of the art in simulating human figures, discusses the many areas of application and predicts the future in this exciting, fast moving field.

Current computer graphics hardware and software make it possible to synthesize near photo-realistic images, but the simulation of natural-looking motion of articulated figures remains a difficult and challenging task. Skillfully rendered animation of humans, animals, and robots can delight and move us, but simulating their realistic motion holds great promise for many other applications as well, including ergonomic engineering design, clinical diagnosis of pathological movements, rehabilitation therapy, and biomechanics. Making Them Move presents the work of leading researchers in computer graphics, psychology, robotics and mechanical engineering who were invited to attend the Workshop on the Mechanics, Control and Animation of Articulated Figures held at the MIT Media Lab in April 1989. The book explores biological and robotic motor control, as well as state-of-the-art computer graphics techniques for simulating human and animal figures in a natural and physically realistic manner.