Designing a Virtual Manikin Animation Framework Aimed at Virtual Prototyping

Abstract: In the industry, numerous commercial packages provide tools to introduce, and analyse human behaviour in the product's environment (for maintenance, ergonomics...), thanks to Virtual Humans. We will focus on control. Thanks to algorithms newly introduced in recent research papers, we think we can provide an implementation, which even widens, and simplifies the animation capacities of virtual manikins. In order to do so, we are going to express the industrial expectations as for Virtual Humans, without considering feasibility (not to bias the issue). The second part will show that no commercial application provides the tools that perfectly meet the needs. Thus we propose a new animation framework that better answers the problem. Our contribution is the integration - driven by need ~ of available new scientific techniques to animate Virtual Humans, in a new control scheme that better answers industrial expectations.