The decade of the 80's saw the dramatic expansion of high performance computer graphics into domains previously able only to irt with the technology. Among the most dramatic has been the incorporation of real-time interactive manipulation and display for human gures. Though actively pur- sued by several research groups, the problem of providing a virtual or synthetic human for an engineer or designer already accustomed to Computer-Aided De- sign techniques was most comprehensively attacked by the Computer Graphics Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. The breadth of that eort as well as the details of its methodology and software environment are presented in this volume.

This book is intended for human factors engineers requiring current knowl- edge of how a computer graphics surrogate human can augment their analy- ses of designed environments. It will also help inform design engineers of the state-of-the-art in human gure modeling, and hence of the human-centered design central to the emergent notion of Concurrent Engineering. Finally, it documents for the computer graphics community a major research eort in the interactive control and motion specication of articulated human gures.

Many people have contributed to the work described in this book, but the textual material derives more or less directly from the eorts of our current and former students and sta: Tarek Alameldin, Francisco Azuola, Breck Baldwin, Welton Becket, Wallace Ching, Paul Diefenbach, Barbara Di Eu- ngenio, Jerey Esakov, Christopher Geib, John Granieri, Marc Grosso, Pei- Hwa Ho, Mike Hollick, Moon Jung, Jugal Kalita, Hyeongseok Ko, Eunyoung Koh, Jason Koppel, Michael Kwon, Philip Lee, Libby Levison, Gary Monheit, Michael Moore, Ernest Otani, Susanna Wei, GrahamWalters, Michael White, Jianmin Zhao, and Xinmin Zhao. Additional animation help has come from Leanne Hwang, David Haynes, and Brian Stokes. John Granieri and Mike Hollick helped considerably with the photographs and gures.