Pose to Seat: Automated Design of Body-Supporting Surfaces

Abstract: The design of functional seating furniture is a complicated process which often requires extensive manual design effort and empirical evaluation. We propose a computational design framework for pose-driven automated generation of body-supports which are optimized for comfort of sitting. Given a human body in a specified pose as input, our method computes an approximate pressure distribution that also takes frictional forces and body torques into consideration which serves as an objective measure of comfort. Utilizing this information to find out where the body needs to be supported in order to maintain comfort of sitting, our algorithm can create a supporting mesh suited for a person in that specific pose. This is done in an automated fitting process, using a template model capable of supporting a large variety of sitting poses. The results can be used directly or can be considered as a starting point for further interactive design.