Professor Karim Abdel-Malek poses for a portrait Friday in Virtual Soldier Research program room at the University of Iowa’s College of Engineering. Press-Citizen/Matthew Holst

Small green and red spheres appeared before him. With a click of a computer mouse, the man reached out to the spheres, his skin twisting and bending as he moved his arms.

This was just a small part of the movements of Santos, a virtual reality human created by the Virtual Soldier Research program at the University of Iowa's College of Engineering.

Headed by biomedical engineering professor Karim Abdel-Malek, the group has worked since October to develop a virtual human system that can test human reactions to different climates, situations and environments for the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, Mich. Engineers then can design and build their products based on the results without building an expensive prototype first, Abdel-Malek said.

"The only missing part is the human factor," Abdel-Malek said, explaining Santos can be controlled or react to a scenario. "He knows what's around him."

Abdel-Malek has researched virtual reality the past 10 years. UI's Virtual Soldier Research program was born when TACOM called last year with a renewable $2.5 million yearly contract to build a system to do human factor studies. The end result so far, created by a 36-member staff that includes nine professors, is Santos.

The virtual soldier has damageable skin and contracting muscles that change depending on a real-time environment. The skin is detailed to the point of wrinkles, modeled after an unidentified subject, Abdel-Malek said.

"We care about how he looks a lot, about how his skin deforms," he said.

The digital human's movements are modeled by photographing with infrared cameras a person in a special suit covered with sensors. Images then are transferred to a computer and, using ergonomics, the movements are calculated to how much abuse a real human could take, program staffer Brad Parker said.

TACOM's main purpose was to see how humans could fit into new vehicles, Parker said, and how they would react to different situations running the vehicle.

"You can find out how a real person would perform," Parker said. "The military's got a hard job, so they really have to be on their toes."

The group also is working to make Santos user-friendly, installing a basic computer operating system.

"We can package it as a software program and anybody can use it to test their prototypes," said Amos Patrick, a UI research graduate students with the program.

Program staffers will work to eventually apply the Santos program to other uses for companies such as John Deere, Honda and Maytag, using a different digital person than the athletic soldier in the Army's Santos program.

"He would respond differently," Abdel-Malek said.

Abdel-Malek and 23 others from the program will give a sneak preview of Santos next week at the Society of Automotive Engineering Digital Human Modeling Conference in Oakland, Mich. The group then officially will unveil Santos at the same conference next year, this time at UI.

"It's going straight forward to something," Abdel-Malek said. "I can see the end to it."