Highly controllable virtual humans are essential for simulations that involve interactionswith highly detailed virtual environments. These virtual environments could represent a power plant, an airport, a ship, or a factory. In most cases these virtual environments are created from CAD systems and represent conceptual or detailed designs. It is desired that these simulations include real world operations and activities for the virtual humans. This will ensure the design is safer, more useful, maintainable, and more comfortable for the targeted user population.

Creating realistic animations of digital human figures remains a great challenge in computer graphics. Modeling human shape, motion, and appearance is very difficult. The main problem is we are accustomed to seeing other humans and are quick to detect flaws. There are many available techniques. In most cases each technique makes some trade-offs in order to concentrate on some specific part of animating a digital human. The goal of this research is to build a foundation that can be used for basic engineering studies. This means an initial requirement will be to geometrically represent the human figure accurately for the different population sizes. As the research progresses, the goal will be to add highly realistic motion and appearance to the anthropometrically correct human figures. After motion and appearance are acceptable the next challenge will be to add high level behaviors to one human figure, or to a group of human figures working collaboratively.