Creating a virtual human that visualizes skin strain distribution for apparel wearing simulation

This paper describes the first step of our research collaboration to create a virtual human that simulates strain of the skin to aid the design of comfortable, ergonomic sportswear. We apply insights from sports science and computer graphics. For the former, human's kinematic properties, such as the angular rotation for each joint or the magnitude of strain on the subject's skin, play an important role in understanding and simulating human movements. Contrarily, during the creation of computer graphics characters, artists mainly focus on a plausible appearance instead of these properties. Therefore, creating such a virtual human model poses several significant interdisciplinary challenges. We demonstrate several collaborative efforts and initial research results, focusing on how to visualize human skin strain distribution of lower body of a 3D human model. The human surface model, skin strain shader, and its rig are also briefly described. Finally, we discuss our early results and future scope of our collaborative work.