Dynamic generation of human-populated VR models for workspace ergonomie evaluation

Abstract

Human-populated VR models have been employed by many researchers to evaluate workspace occupational health and safety (OHS) problems. Previous researches in VR-based ergonomic evaluation have taken a model-based, quantitative approach where human posture data are extracted from virtual space and sent to ergonomic models to calculate numeric results. Such model-based approach requires the VR model to be integrated with complex human models and ergonomic evaluation models. Construction of the virtual workspace thus becomes complicated and difficult, which often stops industrial adoption of the VR technology in ergonomic evaluation. To address this problem, this paper presents an easy-to-construct human-populated VR model to support visualization-based, qualitative workspace OHS evaluation. Details of the workspace layout design and the operation procedure design, and the dynamic VRML modeling to support the workspace design are discussed. Based on the proposed method, a human-populated virtual workspace is implemented to evaluate OHS problem associated with the design of a ship operation room. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.