  When designing a product that needs to fit the human shape, designers often
use a small set of 3D models, called design models, either in physical or
digital form, as representative shapes to cover the shape variabilities of the
population for which the products are designed. Until recently, the process of
creating these models has been an art involving manual interaction and
empirical guesswork. The availability of the 3D anthropometric databases
provides an opportunity to create design models optimally. In this paper, we
propose a novel way to use 3D anthropometric databases to generate design
models that represent a given population for design applications such as the
sizing of garments and gear. We generate the representative shapes by solving a
covering problem in a parameter space. Well-known techniques in computational
geometry are used to solve this problem. We demonstrate the method using
examples in designing glasses and helmets.
