“Just like in the movies, we hook people up with sensors to understand exactly how they move when they are interacting with their vehicles,” Gary Strumolo, Ford research and engineering manager said.
“Once we have all that motion captured, we create virtual humans that we can use to run thousands of tests that help us understand how people of all sizes and shapes interact with all kinds of vehicle designs. It’s an incredibly efficient way of engineering tomorrow’s vehicles.”
Ford's application of the technology is called Human Occupant Package Simulator (HOPS) and combines motion-capture software with a special test vehicle. A human is outfitted with up to 50 motion-capture sensors and then he performs a series of movements, such as swinging a leg outside of the vehicle or reaching for the seat belt. What is recorded this way is transferred into VR and turned into digital models.
“Before HOPS, the only way to evaluate a given design was to have people get into a vehicle and tell us how they liked it,” Nanxin Wang, Ford technical leader said. “This took lots of time and guesswork. Now we can couple this subjective appraisal with objective measurements of their arms, legs and head movements, along with muscular efforts to quantify movement mathematically. Our design teams use the data as a guide for developing a variety of vehicle platforms that provide optimal comfort, regardless of a person’s size or shape.”
The motion-capture tech is also used in Ford’s Immersive Virtual Evaluation (iVE) lab, where virtual vehicles complete with exterior views with buildings, intersections and pedestrians are created.
“This technology enables us to evaluate many vehicle exterior and interior alternatives in a virtual environment from any location – in the driver’s seat or hundreds of feet away from the vehicle – with animated characters and vehicles,” Elizabeth Baron, technical specialist in Virtual Reality and Advanced Visualization at Ford concluded.
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