The Virtual Soldier Research program at the UI College of Engineering has been invited to show off its technology at the SIGGRAPH 2004, the 31st annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, next month in Los Angeles. SIGGRAPH is a part of the Association of Computing Machinery.

The VSR program is funded under a $2.5 million contact from the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Command Center (TACOM). A team of researchers are working to create "autonomous digital humans" that can answer how humans would interact with proposed vehicles and weapons systems.

Farrell said the digital humans the team is creating will be programmed to provide the feedback that a real human would provide in a simulated world. The are able to respond to inputs "on the fly," answering such questions as the joint angles that would be required for a human operator to reach a switch, and how long the human would be comfortable doing a particular task.

The 8-month-old project involves 35 UI researchers, 25 of them students. It is looking for ways to eliminate one of the few remaining reasons to build costly real-world prototypes, according to Karim Abdel-Malek, VSR director and associate professor of biomedical engineering. The effort is being funded by TACOM as part of development efforts toward the Future Combat System, a new generation of high-technology battlefield systems.

Rockwell Collins, the Cedar Rapids-based avionics and communications company, develops products for the Future Combat System.