Ergonomic-driven Geometric Exploration and Reshaping

Abstract: The paper addresses the following problem: given a set of man-made shapes, e.g., chairs, can we quickly rank and explore the set of shapes with respect to a given avatar pose? Answering this question requires identifying which shapes are more suitable for the defined avatar and pose; and moreover, to provide fast preview of how to alter the input geometry to better fit the deformed shapes to the given avatar pose? The problem naturally links physical proportions of human body and its interaction with object shapes in an attempt to connect ergonomics with shape geometry. We designed an interaction system that allows users to explore shape collections using the deformation of human characters while at the same time providing interactive previews of how to alter the shapes to better fit the user-specified character. We achieve this by first mapping ergonomics guidelines into a set of simultaneous multi-part constraints based on target contacts; and then, proposing a novel contact-based deformation model to realize multi-contact constraints. We evaluate our framework on various chair models and validate the results via a small user study.