Your Life Graph composed of X3D Scene Graphs!

I think it is funny how one can play with words and think (s)he may have coined an new one until searching the Internet. That happened to me today after dinner as I pondered how should the X3D Specifications change, if at all, to support a lifetime of data in scene graphs representing the user's body, bought goods & services, and plots of land (and other natural resources one can have deed/title too). When I hit the Return button after typing "life graph" in the Google Search engine, over 9,000 hits returned. So much for a coining a new term. Maybe I replace nHand software with LifeGraph software for a title of my vaporware!

Let me tell you what I've stumbled across over the last month and what real work remains. The Digital Humnan Consortium is the highlight of my surfing. Apparently for the last seven years a loose group of human modelers have form a virtual organization to implement a digital model of the male and female human bodies using the open source paradigm. The First International Conference on Digital Human Modeling occurred in Beijing, China in July 2007 in the framework of the 12th Int'l Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2007 with eight other thematically similar conferences. ISBN: 978-3-540-73318-8 is the 1068 proceedings available for $139 from Springer.com. The initiative is Herculean because the Consortium's goals include federating several human body simulations from the microscopic functions of cells in all tissues to the macroscopic behaviors of organ systems responding to external stimuli like surgery, toxic fumes, vehicle crashes, etc.

From an X3D perspective, I just want to know if the Consortium will deliver their simulation results via the WWW and use X3D on mega and gigapixel displays or even volumetric displays to do so. I forwarded some info to the Chairs of the Working Groups for Medical X3D and Human Animination (H-Anim) because the hierarchy of computation burden would be simulation, as the most intensive, then animation and finally visualization. When I thought about my concept of scene graphs given with the goods & services of purchases that are digitally signed with date & time stamps in sequence on the user's "life graph", I imagined web services to for a fee or free that fetched data too computationally and/or informationally intensive for the user's computing machinery. Basically, the architecture design for nHand (Life Graph) software will entail a Software as a Servcie (SaaS) component to allow owners/users of goods & services to submit their digtially signed and registered products or digital human models to ...providers for simulation and get back an X3D file that will drive an Life Graph animation that answers the questions vividly and possibly with synthesized sounds & voices.

Three classes of examples are buying a part and/or service for your body. You submit the lastest digital model of yourself in lieu of visiting the service provider and/or manufacturer for whatever reason and they reply with parametrics of the good's fitness for purpose as tailored to your anthropometric model. In the case of a service, the provider will send back an animation of how your human body will be manipulated. The second class of example is with a good or service for a good or service you own or regularly purchase, like your vehicle, be it your bicycle, plane, truck or yacht. You transfer your vehicle's digital model to a regulator for inspection or licensing after repairs where complete in the digital model and the regulator will given you a conditional permit or license based on the trust in the digital signature trail of qualified parts and mechanics who installed and checked out the installation. The third class of example is natural resource usage. Say you have a lawn (landscape) that needs regrading because of water erosion or some other slow pace effect cumulating into a situation requiring immediate attention. The owner might go out and securely transmit their landscape in digital (X3D) form (i.e., subterranean and terranean features) to a lawn doctor for editing/authoring that represents the plan result if they service it or the County Land Title Office for work permits, etc.

I sent two or three emails to contacts on a few of the Digital Human Consortium web sites but no responses (and no surprise).