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This New Technology Could Drastically Change Industries from Fashion to War

New ways of modeling the shape and movement of the bodies of actual people are going long way toward advancing cutting-edge products out of CGI and into real life.
Image by M. C. Morgan

Body Labs is a Manhattan-based company that could turn out to be Very Important. As Body Labs CEO Bill O'Farrell put it to VICE News, "In terms of acuity, we believe we have the most sophisticated statistical understanding of the human body."

That assertion certainly sounds important — and it turns out that the object of O'Farrell's pride could have a big impact on everything from fashion to war.

This technology is like an iceberg: there's a huge amount of stuff underneath what appears to be a relatively insignificant development — namely an improvement in the processing of body measurements, or "anthropometric scanning data." And like an iceberg, if you focus on the visible bit and ignore the rest, you could end up missing Very Important things. In the case of this scanning technology, you might end up missing a development that could potentially change how humanity makes and designs anything and everything that people physically interact with.

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Most folks don't spend a huge amount of time contemplating the ways they interact with man-made stuff. When things don't quite fit or work the way we think they should, we adapt, move on, and cope with all of the things that just don't quite fit or work the way we think they should. But the reason we have to do all that is because of the gulf between the idealized concept of the human body that is used in designs and the body shapes of actual people.

The use of computers in design spawned a big change in the fields of ergonomics and "human factors," which are focused on our interactions with machinery, tools, safety equipment, and practically everything else. Rather than just creating a digital mannequin to plop into a design, engineers created digital models of the human body based on the mechanics of actual skeletons, joints, and muscles. This allowed them to test how a person would physically interact with other stuff before building a full-scale prototype.

Does this biomechanical model make my ass look fat?

But while these digital figures or avatars can represent the biomechanical behavior of a person's musculoskeletal structure, they're still just idealized models that have, at best, tenuous links to the actual shapes we see in the population. If the average height of a given population is 6 feet and you're a different height, well then it just sucks to be you.

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It is possible to plug size and shape data into a computer to produce a more accurate digital avatar, but there are some problems. O'Farrell told VICE News that "in the past, this process was very manual and highly stylized." In essence, doing the job by hand is slow and sloppy.

Cheap and rapid 3D scanning (like the kind used in Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing device for its Xbox consoles) has been the almost-but-not-quite breakthrough for quickly sizing people up. Such scanners generate a set of points (or "point cloud") that allow a computer to describe some unidentified blobular shape that you and I recognize as human. But as far as the computer can tell, it's just a blob with stuff sticking out of it; it's nothing a computer can actually interpret and really use.

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It's like scanning a document. You can scan some text, but the computer doesn't just read that as text — all it has (at first) is a picture of words and letters. Until the computer runs some Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program, the picture is just a collection of pixels. But after an OCR program has recognized the text in an image, you can do things like copy and paste into other applications and fiddle with font or color or anything else that strikes your fancy.

This is where Body Labs comes in. The company is basically doing for people and digital avatars what OCR has done for text and scanning. It has created a mathematical model to describe the human shape in very high detail and has developed techniques to process a quick 3D scan of the body, send it off to the cloud, and turn it into a biomechanical model. Moreover, this can be done fast and done cheaply.

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First off, this means someone can get a scan and theoretically be able to actually compare their "official digital self" to pants (or whatever) without having to try on every single pair of pants in the damn store to find a pair that fits right. For that matter, you could send your data file to whomever makes whatever stuff you want and get them to crank out a custom-made version of whatever it is they produce. You'd get automated bespoke clothing for store-bought prices, all while saving yourself the trouble of putting down the Cheetos and leaving the couch.

This might seem like an awfully large amount of hoopla over saving you the trouble of showing up somewhere and letting a stranger with a measuring tape have their way with you, but the technology has further implications. The anthropometric guys can measure a large enough population of folks in enough detail to create a statistically meaningful, high-fidelity model of how actual humans are shaped. This lets the ergonomics guys take huge amounts of guesswork out of figuring out how people, writ large, will interact with the stuff they're designing.

When engineers are designing a car, they'll be able to know all kinds of useful things early in the design process. For instance, a given sports car might be a real pain for 17 percent of the population to actually get out of the car, unless the seat design is changed. Or, by tying the biomechanical data to other statistical information, you could determine that 83 percent of people over the age of 80 won't be able to see over the steering wheel of their gigantic luxury car.

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As with just about anything that gives us more information about the human body, this kind of high-fidelity mapping will inevitably tell us a lot about ourselves. More concretely, it will give researchers tools for thinking about body shape and more traditional measures of obesity like the body mass index (BMI) more concretely. Considering that Kobe Bryant and LeBron James are considered "overweight" by current standards, accurate body mapping combined with a better understanding of the distribution of muscle mass will help evolve a better understanding of obesity, nutrition, and health.

But what Body Labs is enabling the Army to do is a better way of talking about the downstream potential of this new high-power mojo.

When the Army wants to make new body armor and uniforms and whatnot, it turns to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, located in Natick, Massachusetts. Until recently, scientists and engineers there were referring to a huge database of soldier measurements taken in 1988 to design stuff for troops to use.

"Since the last survey, the composition of the Army is now a lot different," David Accetta, a spokesman for Natick, explained to VICE News. "There is a lot more diversity and many more women in the Army."

Included in that greater diversity is a greater diversity of body shapes. Many of today's soldiers are just plain bigger. Some are taller. While some are fatter, more soldiers are lifting weights and becoming beefier. So the soldiers of today are shaped differently, broadly speaking, but nobody could really put a precise number on "bigger" or turn it into useful info.

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Having a more detailed and up-to-date database can help the Army improve body armor. For example, developing armor for females is an important task for the Army because women will be exposed to hostile fire more frequently than before. The way body armor fits a person directly affects how well it protects that person. Females are shaped differently than males, and most body armor has been developed to fit males. Getting armor that fits female soldiers better is therefore important, otherwise you'll end up with a subpopulation of soldiers who would be needlessly endangered.

The applications go beyond body armor. There's also the whole matter of vehicle design — or "occupant-centric" design for vehicles and aircraft, as Accetta put it. He said that the new survey of soldier shapes and sizes includes samples of very specific populations, so new equipment designs can work better for a more diverse Army population.

This is why the folks at Natick went down to Ft. Rucker, the Army's big helicopter school, and did a survey of aviators there to see what the population of pilots looked like. When the current attack helicopters were designed a couple decades ago, they were built for male aviators. Men are, on average, taller than women, so while there are more female aviators in the Army than ever before, the helicopters aren't a great fit for the new aviators. That affects pilot fatigue, operator error rates, and other issues. This new data, Accetta explained, "allows engineers to include fit data in the ability to reach controls and make that aircraft more comfortable to fly on extended missions."

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"When you're working with a real body, you can play around with where you place body armor plates," Dr. Brian Corner, the lead scientist for the Army's Three Dimensional Data Acquisition and Analysis Program at Natick, told VICE News. "Is there a better way to place the hard plates without interfering with movement and without reducing impact protection?"

Corner explained that the old data set that was used to design armor was based on the measurement of a standing soldier, but designers had no information on how people are shaped when they sit, crouch, run, or do anything else. So at Natick, they would design armor, make a prototype, and bring in some random folks, have them try it on, and then ask them if it pinches or rides up when they're standing, sitting, or crouching.

Being unable to get a good feel for how a soldier's body behaves when the person is kneeling is a real impediment when it comes to designing things like kneepads.

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Today, the designers can figure out where gear will shift as the soldier moves or changes position using highly detailed data about body shapes. It's not just figuring out where and when equipment will pinch, but how it shifts and whether those shifts will expose more of the soldier to harm.

Now, start taking these actually representative avatars, and consider how that works with other biological data. "We're basically building a model of the human body from the skin in," Corner told VICE News. There are generic models of internal organs, but the new shape data gives the army something they can connect that internal model to. This means you can determine not just how people move, but where all their innards get to when they're in different positions or poses.

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Applying this to gear and equipment means that instead of just figuring out if people can get in and out of a Humvee wearing body armor, you can start generating valuable analysis that deals with a whole slew of design cases. Hypothetically, it might be possible to work through a scenario a little something like this: A solider is sitting in a vehicle. Because the person is sitting, the armor shifts, changing the areas being protected. This shifting armor might expose specific internal organs, increasing the odds that an IED blast from one or another direction might shred the soldier's kidneys. Therefore, if the vehicle adds such-and-such armor plate to that particular spot, it will improve survivability from IED attacks.

Being able to ask and answer those kinds of questions about how a soldier's internal organs will or won't be protected from a blast gives a better perspective on what "changing the way that humans interact with manmade objects" could actually get to. It goes way beyond just getting a pair of pants that fits properly.

Much further out, this is probably going to be a key enabling technology if anyone ever wants to get around to making viable exoskeletons. "Right now, labs build one or two models and fit them for specific individuals for research and testing," Corner said. That's just not going to cut it if you want to get those suits out of the lab and make exoskeletons a viable and practical technology.

There's still some important research to be done, to be sure, but having these new ways of modeling the shape and movement of real people is going to go a long, long way toward moving this kind of thing out of CGI and into real life.

Which kind of brings the whole thing full circle, in a way. The problem has been getting the shape of a person into a computer. But now technologies like those used in gaming systems can be used to create accurate digital avatars. The ability to have accurate-but-fake digital people that a design program can use will be critical to converting heretofore completely fictional technologies (like powered combat armor) into actual products.

Follow Ryan Faith on Twitter: @Operation_Ryan

Photo via Flickr