Motion-capture technology isn’t something only used by James Cameron in Avatar to render the world of Pandora, home of the Na’vi. Ford Motor uses motion-capture to create digital human models that are then deployed within virtual vehicles for testing. It is said to be the only automaker that uses motion-capture for this application.

“Just like in the movies, we hook people up with sensors to understand exactly how they move when they are interacting with their vehicles. 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,” said Gary Strumolo, manager, Ford Research and Engineering.

They’re using a system called the “Human Occupant Package Simulator” (HOPS) that melds the physical and digital worlds.

A human is fitted with up to 50 motion-capture sensors, then put into a test rig that simulates a vehicle. The test subject performs a variety of tasks, like reaching for a seat belt or getting into or out of the “car.” The movements performed are recorded. Then, a digital model is created of the person, which is then used within a variety of vehicle types and sizes.

Nanxin Wang, Ford technical leader, noted, “Comfort or discomfort is inherently a subjective measure. For a given vehicle, some people will say it’s comfortable to get in, while others may say just the opposite. The challenge is to find out why people feel that way and how we can change the design to improve the perception. 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. 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.”

In other words, they’re able to determine just what actions are correlated with the comfort or discomfort.

Meanwhile, over in the Ford Immersive Virtual Evaluation (iVE) lab, they’re integrating virtual vehicles with environments and allowing people to “drive” the vehicles in this virtual space.

The iVE features a Cave Automated Virtual Environment, which is described by Elizabeth Baron, technical specialist, Virtual Reality and Advanced Visualization, as “a room where images are projected in stereo onto three walls and the ceiling to generate real-time, virtual vehicle interiors and exteriors at actual scale. When you look around, you can see virtually everything inside and outside of a vehicle that is still only a design in a computer.”

Then there is the Programmable Vehicle Model (PVM), which combines an adjustable physical model of a vehicle interior so that there is haptic—touch—feedback with the digital world. Baron: “We set up key dimensions—steering wheel, gas, brake, center stack, etc.—and then we put the virtual world around that physical model. Instead of being in a room, you’re actually sitting in a representation of the vehicle. You can touch and feel most everything, but what you’re looking at is digital.”

The point of all of this—from the motion-capture sensors to HOPS to the CAVE to PVM—is to help accelerate the development and cost-effective engineering of high-quality vehicles.