ITL signs MOA with Air Force Research Lab for 3D
human body visualization
ITL’s Information Access Division completed a
Memorandum of Agreement with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)’s Human
Effectiveness Directorate, establishing a formal working relationship in the
area of 3D human body visualization. The primary goal is to establish the World
Engineering Anthropometry Resource (WEAR) program as an outgrowth of the
recently completed CAESAR (Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry
Resource) project in which the CAESAR consortium collected three-dimensional
surface scans of several thousand individuals. The goal of NIST, AFRL, and
others, is to establish WEAR as the publicly accessible comprehensive source of
information about
anthropometry, in collaboration with other government agencies and industrial
partners. Anthropometry is the study of
human body measurement for use in anthropological classification and
comparison. 3D body scans are new to
the design process; this initial set of scans can serve as a resource for
engineers and product designers needing representations of the human body. This
data could be used in the design of furniture and safer products, such as
automobiles, aircraft, and lawnmowers.
The project in the Information Access Division is entitled Visualization
and Virtual Reality for Manufacturing. As part of this project, a NIST CAESAR viewer was
developed to enable Web three-dimensional visualization of graphical images of
human figures produced from 3D scans.
The viewer software is freely available at
ovrt.nist.gov/anthroindex.html.