3-D Models and Tools for Analysis of the Human Body can be Prepared by Body Labs


08/24/2015



A request to help out the police in a murder case is what gave rise to a company that provides 3-D version of body images form a minimum of body measurements.
 
This was exactly what happened to Professor Michael Black from Brown University, a computer vision expert, who was asked by police to help solve a murder. This information was revealed by Issie Lapowsky in the article Wired.
 
The firm thus formed by Professor Michael Black was named Body Labs which helps in is collecting, digitizing and organizing all of the data and information that are related to eh shape, pose and motion of the human body.

The aim of the company is to enable the designing, production, buying and selling of goods and services by the transformation of the human body into a digital platform.
 
The first target market for the company is clothing and apparel even as the field of forensic sciences is an ideal field for such modelling and analysis.
 
The use of the 3-D imaging of human body can also be put to use in analysis of body mass index through the use of the product BodyKit, developed by the company.
 
A collection of APIs and embeddable components in beta in the BodyKit allow users to virtualize, analyse and simulate any human body. In a manner that was never before possible, utilization of the data around the human body’s shape, size and movement by designers and developers would be enabled by the new additions.
 
“The Instant API lets you create bodies from just a few measurements by leveraging our statistical model and dataset to predict body shape and measurements,” says an official document of the company.

The volume and surface area of any body or specific body part such as the arms, legs or torso can be computed by BodyKit.

The health and fitness industry can be fields where this can have a number of viable applications and can be of particular relevance where body and body segment volumes can be indicative of certain medical conditions. It can also serve as a proxy to estimate body composition and therefore overall health.

Users can create and download a mesh, otherwise known as a 3-D body model by inputting any number of body measurements into BodyKit athe tool enables virtual reality and automatic rigging of any mesh generated.

Making a digital skeleton more like a real one, with joints and bones using a static mesh model created in many 3-D applications is known as rigging.

CAD/3-D animation programs such as Autodesk Maya or Blender and Adobe’s Creative Cloud can be used easily to manipulated and animated as the rigged meshes would be output in standard .FBX format.

A variety of data such as motion, 2-D, 3-D, audio, and video can be stored in the object-based format which is known as FBX.

A new tool being researched by the company called the Automatic Pattern Generator enables the automatic resizing of clothing patterns around a new person in a manner similar to using a 3-D model of the person while the exact fit of the original garment is maintained.

“This feat is made possible by our body models’ point-to-point correspondence — the ability to keep track of each and every point on the body across different shapes and poses,” says an official document of the company site.

(Source: www.forbes.com)