Virtual Fit Tool
The Virtual Fit Tool 2.0 is for anyone looking to access anthropometric (body measurement) data or design something that will interact with people’s bodies. You can use this tool to see what percentage of people design specifications for workstations or other designs will fit (see “Evaluate Design Specs”) or body measurements and combinations of measurements associated with different percentiles of the US population (see “Explore Anthropometry”). More information about this tool can be found at the bottom of this webpage.
Evaluate Design Specs
Design variables differ from anthropometric measures in that they include other factors that influence how a person’s body interacts with a design, like shoe heel height, for example. Use the links below to determine what percentage of people certain design specifications will work for, or “accommodate,” or to identify specs that will accommodate a desired percentage of people.
Workstations
These links will configure the tool to show just the fields you need.
chairs, sofas, benches, and bleachers
desks and tables for seated work
desks and tables for standing work
desks and tables for seated and standing work
Other designs
These links will configure the tool to show just the relevant variables.
design variables that are relevant if the user will interact with the design in a seated position
design variables that are relevant if the user will interact with the design in a standing position
design variables that are relevant if the user will interact the design in seated or standing positions
Explore Anthropometry
Use the links below to discover percentile values for different body measurements and combinations of measurements. For example, you can find what percentage of people are over 1700 mm tall and also have a BMI under 25. To see measures with the effects of shoes and clothing included, or design variables, see “Evaluate Design Specs” below.
body measurements that are observable while someone is sitting down
body measurements that are observable while someone is standing up
body measurements that are observable while someone is sitting and/or standing
More About the VFT 2.0
The Virtual Fit Tool 2.0 was derived from the original Virtual Fit Multivariate Anthropometric Tool created by Professors Matt Parkinson and Matt Reed and further guided by the ANSI/HFES 100-2007 Standard for computer workstations. This version was designed and developed after a study from an undergraduate thesis project showed that the original tool was difficult for non-experts to use and understand. While it is functionally similar to the original, it was created to be more usable and accessible to people with a range of design experience levels, from design researchers, to industry practitioners, to students, to non-designers with an interest in anthropometry.
The anthropometric data comes from CAESAR data taken from American, Canadian, and European people that has been reweighted using NHANES, another survey that collected less detailed data about the US population. The reweighting procedure provides detailed data that approximately represents the US civilian population. Some measures (seated elbow height above floor, thigh clearance above floor, knee depth, and foot depth) are derived from other dimensions and are therefore estimates.
The Virtual Fit Tool 2.0 and its predecessor perform multivariate analysis, which makes them more valuable than simple anthropometric tables for complex design problems. Multivariate analysis is based on the understanding that designs can fail to fit people in multiple ways. For example, a doorway can be too short for some people and too narrow for some people. There may be some overlap between people who are too tall and people who are too wide for the doorway, but they are not all the same people. This is important because a design won’t work well for someone even if it only fails to fit them in a single way; just hitting their head on the doorway or not fitting through is enough to feel uncomfortable. This means that if the doorway is tall enough for 90% of people and wide enough for 90% of people, the total percentage of the people that the doorway will work for will be less than 90%. A univariate analysis would only tell us that the doorway is tall enough for 90% of people and wide enough for 90% of people, but multivariate analysis takes all variables into account simultaneously and shows us how many people the doorway will work for in every way at the same time. This is called the “total accommodation,” and for problems with more than one variable, calculating total accommodation requires multivariate analysis.
