Virtual Seat Assessment Tools

I presented an update of our virtual seat fit assessment work at the 8th Annual Automotive Seating Innovators Summit in Detroit. This collaboration builds on work my colleague Jingwen Hu presented at the SAE Congress in 2013. The critical insight behind this work is that rigorous dimensional assessments of seats requires evaluation with hundreds or even thousands of people. Since it's not remotely practical to do that with physical prototypes, virtual seat fit evaluations with synthesized populations of sitters is the only way to conduct an accurate dimensional analysis considering all geometric aspects of the seat sitter interaction, rather than just a few standard anthropometric dimensions. The previous work used 3D body shape models based on CAESAR. The work now underway will apply body shape models based on UMTRI data gathered in a number of studies.