Twelve days after 1.6.3, this is the largest release ErgoSphere has carried, and since it first shipped it has gained its headline: ErgoDesign now has a Biomechanics engine. A new Biomechanics window analyses any posture of the design figure for joint moments, L5/S1 and L4/L5 compression and shear, population percent capable and balance, from an engine built on published sources read by page and table, and every result states where its posture came from. The ErgoDesign figure moves. A new Animation window lays clips, joint keys and finger keys on one timeline, aims reaches and gazes at real items and states any shortfall in millimetres, runs beside the linked HTA's task times, and bands the demonstrated posture against DGUV 208-033 as it plays. Range-of-motion routines play the upper and lower body to the values of MIL-STD-1472H Table XXXI. ErgoDesign also gains a precision sketch window whose shapes extrude straight into the room, a materials library of thirty-eight finishes with a Materials window of its own, a pivot gizmo, a quad menu, and the ability to bring a measured operator from ErgoSense into the modelled room. Six workload and usability tools gain field sheets: print a coded paper form, fill it in on the floor, key it back in against its code. Nine tools gain studies, a board that compares many sessions at once and travels to the Viewer. The RULA and REBA editors are redesigned around a live worksheet, and a result built on starting values now says so wherever it is read. The dossier programme took NIOSH, Snook and the ErgoSense neck through software assurance and source reads. Projects from earlier releases open unchanged.
A Biomechanics button on the ErgoDesign ribbon opens a fourth window beside Animation, Materials and the CAD sketch, with a 3D stage at its centre showing the posed body at true scale in Figure, Model or Both views, the analysis set-up on one side and the results on the other. It runs a full static biomechanical analysis of the posture in front of it: the forces and moments at every major joint, the load on the low back, the share of the population strong enough to hold it, and whether the body is in balance. The window shares the design's posture library, its population, sex and percentile, and its timeline, so scrubbing Main, Animation or Biomechanics moves all three. It opens on the figure already drawn in the main window, and a provenance strip stays in view whenever numbers are shown.
Underneath is a new engine built from published literature alone. The body is a link-segment model from the segment parameters of de Leva (1996), scaled to the analysed subject's sex, stature and body mass, and posed by the figure's twenty-three segments. A static solver returns the net force and moment at the wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, head, L4/L5, L5/S1, hips, knees and ankles, each resolved into its anatomical actions. Hand loads are entered per hand, magnitude and direction, in one dialogue with a tab for each hand, and No load is kept distinct from a load not yet stated. Every value the engine uses was read from the held source by page and table, twice and independently, and every modelling choice the literature does not settle is written down as a declared choice and shown in the window's method and assumptions ledger.
L5/S1 and L4/L5 compression and shear come from the single equivalent muscle model of Chaffin (1969), with its 5.0 cm moment arm and 40 degree standing disc angle, resolved by vector projection onto the disc. Beside it, for L5/S1, the regression equations of Arjmand and colleagues give a second opinion inside the symmetric lifting range they were fitted to, with their reference body printed alongside, and step aside with the reason outside it. The engine reproduces all fifty tasks of the published Arjmand table to within 1.5 N. Limits are selectable: NIOSH by default, the revised Dortmund recommendations of Jäger (2018) by age and sex, and the shear limits of Gallagher and Marras (2012), each applied only to the level its source covers. An L5/S1 disc pressure is offered as an indicative figure, labelled as such and compared with no limit.
Each joint's required moment is set against population strength to give the percentage of women and of men capable, from the Stobbe and Kumar tables in Chaffin, Andersson and Martin (2006), Hughes et al (1999) for the shoulder, Harbo, Brincks and Andersen (2012) and Frey-Law et al (2012), with all 592 strength rows checked against the sources. Capability is banded on the NIOSH Work Practices Guide's own criteria. A joint whose strength is not held reads Not assessed, in a neutral colour and never as a pass, and the whole-body line names the limiting joint and counts what it could not assess. Sustained holds gain an endurance estimate after Frey Law and Avin (2010), and the trunk, head and upper arm gain ISO 11226 holding times with the standard's conditions stated.
Standing on both feet, on one foot or seated, the engine builds the base of support from foot dimensions in ANSUR II and the functional base of support of Sloot et al (2025) by age group, and states the posture as Stable, Marginal or Not statically possible with its margin in millimetres. Where a posture cannot be held, the foot reactions are withheld rather than invented. Each foot reports its share of the load and its centre of pressure, with an indicative mean plantar pressure, and a foot lifted clear of the floor is said to be off it, not pressed back down.
The stage shows the result as well as the figure: force arrows at the hands, ground reaction arrows at the feet, the centre of mass with a plumb line to the floor, the full and functional base of support, the centre of pressure, and each joint coloured by its percent capable. The picture and the panels read one result, so they cannot disagree. A population scan applies the same posture to women and men at the 5th, 50th and 95th percentiles, and a sensitivity line shows how far the L5/S1 result moves when the trunk is turned a little either way.
Each analysis keeps a copied record of its source, whether posed by hand, taken from the library, or brought in from an ErgoSense take or an ErgoLens capture, with the take, frame and acquisition as they were recorded. Every joint carries a status of Captured, Estimated, Defaulted or Adjusted, the joint rows show the seed value beside the current one, and any joint or the whole posture can be reset to its seed. Results read Unconfirmed until the analyst presses Confirm posture, and any later change to the posture, the body or the loads withdraws the confirmation and says so.
Pose imports an ErgoLens still or a chosen video frame, fits it to the current figure and applies it as an editable pose in one undo step. Animation imports an interval of an ErgoSense take or an ErgoLens recording as editable full-body keys, keeping the elapsed timing and the design's own body dimensions, for up to 180 seconds. Session and capture are chosen separately, older stills are re-detected locally where their keypoints were not kept, and the camera assumptions are stated, never guessed. The original capture history travels with the pose, while captured scores and confirmations do not.
The ErgoDesign posture rule is revised so that a posed figure may now carry a biomechanical analysis, provided its provenance is recorded and shown beside the numbers. The build guard that keeps scoring off posed figures is widened at the same time: RULA and REBA stay barred from them, and a single engine computes joint moments and spinal load. CUELA follows the same principle, so on Findings and in the Viewer a current figure keeps its card and picture with a prompt to tick Assess, and shows its CUELA bands once it is an assessed posture. Findings also offers its three-view pictures for every saved pose.
An Animation button opens a floating window beside the Materials and CAD sketch windows, owned by ErgoDesign and on top of it. It holds a clip library on the left, a stage with a live figure, an inspector, a large timeline and a status bar. The toolbar carries the transport, start, previous key, play, next key, end and loop, a timecode in seconds and frames, Snap to tasks and edges, Auto key, Key pose, Keep frame, zoom, and Drive main view, which plays the animation on the main viewport's figure. The window runs on the same clock as the main time slider, and the main band shows every keyed item's keys faintly and the selection's keys bright. Space plays and pauses on a held frame, the arrows step one frame or, with Shift, one second, comma and full stop jump between keys, and every edit is one undo step.
The library ships twenty-seven clips on three shelves. Poses: standing relaxed, hands at a bench, reach overhead, stoop to the floor, squat, kneel on one knee, sit upright and sit leaning forward. Motions: walk at normal pace, walk carrying, step forward, step back, lift from the floor by squat and by stoop, and place at waist height. Body parts: reach and press, reach and grasp, pull down, point at, look at, glance down and back, and six hand shapes, relaxed, flat, fist, power grip, point and pinch. Every clip is generated inside the figure's joint limits and mirrors automatically to the other side. A fourth shelf, Mine, holds the analyst's own clips, saved with the design.
Six body-part tracks take clips dragged from the library, to be moved, trimmed, blended, looped or mirrored. Each track expands into joint rows, trunk, neck, hips, knees, ankles and each arm's shoulder, elbow, forearm and wrist, with its live value and key diamonds, and a key inspector for time, angle and arrival ease. Every value is a small control: drag up or down, Shift for ten times, Ctrl for a tenth, double-click to type. Shoulder rows read elevation, direction of elevation and rotation, and hip rows flexion, abduction and rotation, each moving alone. Editing a joint on an empty track lays a clip named Keyed across the free gap, and trimming a Keyed clip keeps its keys where they were placed. Each hand carries five finger rows, read as a curl word or a percentage and never as degrees, and arm tracks gain a Fingers row showing the hand changes inside a grasp or a pull. Keys set on equipment appear as rows beneath the figure, on the same clock, and an item's animation swings about its own pivot, so a door turns on its hinge. With Auto key on, posing in the main window keys the figure whether or not the Animation window is open, and the working posture and assessed eye are left untouched.
Press, grasp, pull, point and look clips aim at a point picked on an item and follow that item if it moves. Where the figure cannot get there, the shortfall is stated, in millimetres for a reach and in degrees for a gaze, and drawn on the stage as a dashed line. The figure is never stretched to close the gap. Lift and place clips pick up and set down a named item, a held box keeps its grip and rests where it is released, and every gesture re-solves when the design changes. The stage shows the design's models with their materials, framed on the figure or on the whole scene.
A band across the top of the timeline shows the linked HTA's operations against time, from recorded times or from observed medians with their count, and hatches a task with no time. Clips link to tasks, snap to them, and Fit to task states the change of speed as a percentage. Nothing is ever written back to the HTA. Beneath the band, a posture strip reads the demonstration ten times a second and bands it against DGUV Information 208-033 Annex 3, expanding to one row per region across fourteen regions beneath a declared worst-of row. The strip is declared on its tooltip and in the inspector as the posture of the demonstration, postulated: it computes no duration, time in zone or exposure. Click it to move the playhead. Its declaration was read against the DGUV source, sentence by sentence.
A Saved postures shelf adds a posture to the timeline or creates a transition between two, and the main window's quick Transition opens Animation with its endpoints. Keep frame saves any instant to the posture library under a new Animated origin, which the report prints, along with the positions of the objects at that instant; Design positions restores ordinary placement. A destination line always shows where Auto key will write.
When the analyst opts in, the free Viewer plays the demonstration frame for frame with the application: the figure, its fingers, the moving items, and the task band as a caption. It is display only, and the report knows its captures are stale once the animation changes.
A RANGE group on the Pose ribbon, after TRANSITION, plays an Upper Body and a Lower Body routine through a floating transport with chapters on the scrub bar. Upper body covers shoulder flexion and extension, abduction and rotation, a shoulder circle, elbow, forearm, wrist, neck and a head circle; lower body covers the hip and knee, one leg at a time, with the feet riding the shins. The readout names each movement, its live angle and the source of its end value, either the MIL-STD-1472H Table XXXI mean or the figure's structural bound. Shoulder rotation runs one arm at a time in the position of the standard's figure 55, and the shoulder circle is bounded by the body. A closing extended reach is labelled a Reach Assist demonstration and states no end values. Keep saves any frame with a Range of Motion origin and a declaration in the report, and an In Viewer switch, off by default, puts the study in the client package so the Viewer can play it with its chapters.
The figure's structural limits for shoulder extension, forearm supination and pronation, and wrist ulnar and radial deviation now reach the upper values of MIL-STD-1472H Table XXXI, re-read from the standard itself: 75, 135, 101, 54 and 45 degrees. A standing forward raise takes the arm to overhead. Stopping a forearm, wrist or neck at its limit keeps the joint's other movement, so an elbow can still bend, and ordinary knee and hip posing stops the foot at the ankle's limit. A posture's origin label survives a transition, and a routine or transition keeps playing through the eye view, captures, Save, a theme change and a change of figure, with the eye view's camera following the played head.
A CAD Sketch button in the TOOLS group opens a resizable Precision sketch window on a top or side sheet whose origin is the room's origin. It draws lines, three-point arcs, circles, rectangles with an optional corner radius, Bezier paths, splines and fillets, with node editing, construction geometry, snapping to grid, ends, midpoints, centres, quadrants, intersections, perpendiculars, tangents and alignment guides, Shift for fifteen-degree steps and Ortho for ninety. Lengths, angles and coordinates can be typed while drawing, and live dimensions read as a drafting drawing. Set a depth, offset and direction, check the live 3D preview, and Insert adds every closed shape to the room as a solid in one undoable step, with a shape drawn inside another cutting a through-hole. Arcs and fillets display exactly as they will be built.
Sketches live on named tabs along the foot of the canvas, saved in the project file with their construction lines and their links. Items inserted from a tab are named after it, and MODIFY says which tab drew them, with Edit in CAD sketch opening that tab at the item's current place in the room, rulers in true workspace millimetres. Update then states what it will do, such as update 2, add 1, remove 1, and does it in one undo step, keeping every move, turn or lift made in ErgoDesign and every label the analyst set. Insert as a new item makes unlinked copies. Where an item can no longer be reopened, the panel says why.
Items built from a recipe, CAD inserts, sketch extrusions, Boolean conversions and lathes, now take an exact uniform scale from the gizmo's centre box and an exact handle along an extrusion's sweep, and their CAD drawing scales with them. Changing a plan-drawn extrusion's thickness keeps its floor-side face where it is, so a table top stays on its legs, through-holes stay open and pockets stay put. Fields that cannot change such an item say where it is changed instead.
Items can now wear real materials, drawn at real-world scale with the grain along the item and turnable across it. The library holds thirty-eight finishes across timber, laminate, metal, plastic, glass, fabric, flooring, wall and stone, thirty-two made by ErgoSphere and six photographic scans released to the public domain. Materials belong to the design and are shared, so editing one changes every item wearing it. A FLAT pill in the viewport shows each material as its flat colour. The report's top and side drawings print flat colour; its perspective and eye figures, the Viewer and a client GLB export carry the textures. Smooth metals now reflect their surroundings, including metallic finishes on existing designs and imported models, which will render differently from earlier releases.
A Materials button beside CAD in the TOOLS group opens one window: shelves for the Library, the materials In Design and Custom ones, with search, category chips and squares or spheres; a lit stage that shows a sample as a ball, a block or a bench top at real size, with Pin for side-by-side comparison and a caption such as One repeat covers 600 x 600 mm; and a bench for roughness, metalness and opacity, labelled in plain words, tint, real-world size and Repeat or Mirror. A click shows a material, a double-click or a drag puts it on the selection, including a drag onto the 3D view. New from image turns a PNG or JPEG into a material once its covered size is set and a rights declaration is ticked; the picture is stored in the project and travels to the Viewer. A client GLB repeats a mirrored material rather than mirroring it, because the format's readers do not carry the mirror.
An OPERATOR group on the Pose ribbon imports a window of up to thirty minutes of a measured ErgoSense take into the design, as an unchangeable copy with its provenance: session, take, instrument, window, rate and frames used. Only live-measured or imported recordings are accepted, and a take that cannot be used is listed with its reason. The operator is drawn at true size from their own captured segment lengths, beside the design's figure rather than in place of it. A registration panel places the seat and ties gaze anchors to displays, and reports residuals, heading and drift in plain words. Playback runs at one, four or sixteen times with lanes for anchors, the attributed display and neck demand, and the EYE view rides the operator's measured head. Displays are tinted by dwell share, and a MEASURED OPERATORS card in Findings gives dwell, look-down angle, head angles and viewing distance per display, neck bands against DGUV Information 208-033, and the ten worst moments, each of which seeks the timeline. Where a display has moved since recording, a what-if labelled PREDICTED shows the change. The Word report gains a measured operator section and the Viewer a matching card.
A Gizmo tool in the TRANSFORM group shows an item's own pivot as an orange tripod and moves or turns the pivot rather than the item, in the 3D view and in the plan, side and front panes. Back in Select, rotation, typed or dragged, turns the item about its pivot. MODIFY gains a GIZMO section with offsets, turns and Centre, Base and Reset. Duplicate now carries the whole item, its rotation, colour, shape, model and material.
A right-click without a drag, in any view, opens a four-quadrant menu at the cursor: transform, display, select and object. It reaches isolate, hide and unhide, lock, see-through, select all, none, inverse, similar and by name, Edit in CAD sketch, Materials, rename, edit dimensions, drop to floor, centre on operator, reset rotation and link to parent, and for the figure, drop to floor and plant feet. Shift+F10 or the Menu key opens it from the keyboard. The keymap gains single keys for select, move, rotate, scale and the gizmo, the views, materials, Set Key, Auto Key and play, and a walk mode on the up arrow; Measure, field of view, Lock and Link move to modified keys, listed on the restyled HELP tab.
A great deal of workload and usability data is still collected on paper, on a clipboard, where a laptop is not welcome. IWS, ATWIT, NASA-TLX, SART, SUS and Nielsen now print their own forms: true A4 pages in one family, legible on a black and white printer, with a sheet code and count boxes, set in two typefaces chosen for legibility and shipped with the application under their open licences. A print preview offers Print and Save as PDF and reports the outcome in its own bar. Entry from paper checks the sheet code against the session that printed it, so a form can only come back to where it belongs.
A FIELD SHEETS group carries Print sheets and Enter from paper. IWS prints an observation record of up to twenty-eight rows with planned times, two note columns of the analyst's naming, and an optional rating card of the nine steps with the anchors of Pickup and colleagues (2005), made to be laminated. ATWIT prints sixty rows in blocks of fifteen and a rating card two to a page in Stein's (1985) wording. Entry takes one line per printed row, a rating, X for a missed prompt or blank for a line not reached, with marks for safety-critical, rated afterwards, peak and sustained quiet, notes and an asked-at time, across midnight if need be, then checks the count against the tallies written on the sheet and asks for a reason where they differ. A session can move from live to paper and back. A prompt left open on Finish, a tab change or leaving the page is now recorded as missed, with its time. Reports state response lag over the ratings that had a timed prompt, prompts answered as A of B, how many ratings came from paper, and a rating log where there is anything to log.
The ratings sheet prints six scales as true 120 millimetre lines with twenty-one ticks, a 50 millimetre bar to check the printer's scale, and the instructions of Hart and Staveland's Appendix A. The weighting sheet prints the fifteen pairs in an order unique to the sheet, with that order's number on it. Entry takes the six ratings, reading a mark between ticks as the tick to its right as the method does, then either the fifteen choices or No weights were collected. A session declared unweighted reaches Results as an overall unweighted workload score, every surface says which score it is showing, and reports gain a Score basis row. Scores recalculate when a rating or weight changes after Finish, and the tool home can start a session straight from a blank paper copy.
The SART sheet follows the published form of Selcon and Taylor (1990): ten constructs under Demand, Supply and Understanding, each with Taylor's description, and seven bubbles from Low to High. Entry follows the sheet's order, takes the date and time written on it, and scores once every line is answered. The SUS questionnaire joins the family, and the Nielsen sheet becomes a problem log, one row per problem with ten heuristic bubbles, a severity from 0 to 4 and a recommendation, keeping the customer's own logo. Both record whether a response came from paper or was entered directly and when it was completed, and results state the mix, for example 6 from paper, 2 direct. Each new SUS response starts unanswered, and a Nielsen problem needs a heuristic and a severity before it is added. The emailed forms are unchanged.
A Studies strip now sits above the session grid on nine tool homes: NASA-TLX, IWS, ATWIT, SART, SUS, SWAT, SAGAT, RULA and REBA. A study links sessions rather than copying them, and reads every figure live through the tool's own scorer, so it can never disagree with the sessions it holds. A denominator line opens the board, for example 48 sessions: 44 with a result, 3 in progress, 1 missing. Sessions are grouped by tag, condition, participant, rater, shift, phase, task or date, and cards give a summary, a distribution, a subscale profile, an IWS overlay, bands and statistics. Interval measures show n, mean, standard deviation, median, quartiles and range; IWS and ATWIT are ordinal, so no mean is shown; weighted and unweighted NASA-TLX are never pooled. The Members tab shows each session's tags, result, whether it came from paper, direct entry or both, and flags one that has changed since it was added. Sessions can be added from paper inside the study, IWS can issue a tagged paper sheet per participant, and a result reported elsewhere can be added as reported, not recomputed.
RULA and REBA studies show the distribution of risk bands and an Agreement card: Cohen's kappa for each pair of raters over the action-level bands, with a band mosaic. It is labelled ErgoSphere's declared method and no interpretation scale is applied to it. A study can add companion sessions from a second tool, NASA-TLX beside IWS for instance, and a Pairing card plots the two with Spearman's rho and n, drawing no regression line and computing no rho below three pairs. A Campaign timeline card puts both measures on one day axis. Generate Sample Data now builds ten sample studies, including a signalling week rated by shift.
A Colours pop-out in the card inspector sets where a card's colours start, a colour per group held across the whole board, and colour-by-value rules such as below 5 blue, from 5 orange. A study appears in Deliverables as its own row, can be marked Ready and composed into a Viewer package, and loses its Ready mark the moment a member, tag or card changes.
The IWS and ATWIT results pages gain a 3D skyline view beside the trace, distribution and lag views, a live scene that turns with a drag. The same scene draws in the Viewer from an exported package. ATWIT shows the ratings recorded and IWS its marked events.
Both editors take the form of NIOSH and Snook and keep every posture image. A live worksheet rail runs across the top with the Group A and Group B tiles, the table scores and the grand score with its action band, each tile a button to the stage that sets it. Every stage header carries its code and its source, the figures and tables of McAtamney and Corlett (1993) and Hignett and McAtamney (2000). Every posture card states the grand score the assessment would have if it were chosen, and every modifier chip shows its measured effect, the score with it on minus off, reading +0 honestly at a table's ceiling. Score badges are coloured against the component's own maximum. RULA's trunk-supported modifier sits on the trunk stage, REBA's two knee-flexion boxes exclude each other, and choosing a card no longer moves keyboard focus.
A RULA or REBA stage now counts as confirmed when a value on it is edited or Continue is pressed, side by side, so confirming the right arm does not confirm the left. The stage footer reads Confirmed or Not yet confirmed, unconfirmed tiles are muted, and the rail result reads Provisional until every stage is. The Results stage names the stages still waiting, and Finalise says why it is not yet available. Files saved before this release behave exactly as they did.
For NIOSH, Snook, RULA and REBA, a result that still rests on the editor's starting values now says so outside the editor too. View Report, Export DOCX and the report inside an .ergview open with: Provisional result. These stages still hold the editor's starting values, not observations, followed by the stages, and The scores that rest on them are not findings. The Viewer board leads with the same advisory. A result with every stage observed, and every document from an earlier release, reads exactly as it did.
The dossier programme's software assurance documents turn to the behaviour around a method: what happens to a result as it is edited, converted, undone, saved and reported. For NIOSH and Snook, every such sequence was inspected in the source, reproduced at component level, and the outcome verified independently, including checks that deliberately reintroduce a fault to prove the test catches it. What they now do: an assessment the method no longer applies to keeps its register row with current content and no risk score. Reporting's risk profile draws from scored assessments only and states how many it excluded, and the quality and coverage rings count only assessments that carry a score. NIOSH's metric and imperial switch is one undoable step that converts every field together, and View Report always shows the current inputs with the current result. Snook keeps the exact stored weight or force when a value is re-entered unchanged, in either unit system and in decimal-comma settings, marks the document unsaved on every edit, undo and redo, and gives two assessments that share a title their own score, area and assessor.
The neck rows were read back against DGUV Information 208-033 Annex 3 and ISO 11226:2000 Table 3 and Figure 7, and every row confirmed. Neck banding now comes from the DGUV annex, the same table ErgoDesign uses. The head against the trunk is reported as Neck Bending, green to 25 degrees and red beyond, with no amber, because the table publishes none; Head Inclination and Lateral Head Inclination are measured against the vertical wherever the frames carry a pose. Exposure times are real seconds taken from frame timestamps, held more than two minutes means two minutes, and the Detail page smooths over time rather than over a sample count. The Analysis page and risk map gain a Neck Bending card and dot, the whole-body map shows each region's worst zone as its caption says, and a new neck-bending dial sits beside the head-inclination dial in ErgoSense and ErgoLens. ErgoLens's 2D neck reading follows the same banding, for display; RULA and REBA neck inputs are unchanged. The method line now reads ISO 11226, EN 1005-4, DGUV 208-033. Takes analysed by an earlier release are never rewritten, and every surface that shows one says which version analysed it.
Software assurance also reached the package itself. The installer's build now classifies the architecture of every binary it ships and refuses anything it cannot verify, a check proven against real compiled libraries of each kind. You will not see it, except as the reason the next installer is the one we meant to build.
A project recovered from its autosave now keeps its imported models, reference photographs and measured takes when it is saved, by Save or Save As. One limit is worth knowing: a model, photograph or take added after the last manual save is not in the autosave, so it cannot be recovered with it. Save after adding one.
The first wave of a consistency pass across every page. Data Explorer's Intervention Effectiveness, Assessor Analysis and drill-down text read clearly in the Classic theme. After a live theme switch, the IWS and ATWIT start and stop buttons, the TRACEr, SHERPA, SLIM and SCTA step actions, the register coverage, Role Analysis, ErgoRadar, ErgoCompass and the tool-home Import button follow the new theme without a reload. Unchecked toggles on RULA, REBA, NIOSH, DRT, ATWIT and IWS read clearly in the cyan theme, grey tertiary buttons sit properly on light cards, and the HTA's muted text and Nielsen's severity colours are on theme tokens. Code-built panels in ErgoDesign now follow ErgoDesign's own theme toggle. A guard in the build stops new hand-set colours and sizes creeping back in.
Clearing a session's name in any tool's header now restores the previous name, as Escape does, so a document is never left without a title, and SCTA and REBA give an imported untitled document a default one. On a wide Final Score card the gauge dial draws at its full intended size.
Projects saved by 1.6.3 and earlier open in 1.6.4 and keep their data. Designs without animation play exactly as they did, and saved shoulder and hip keys play unchanged. RULA and REBA documents saved before stage confirmation behave as before, and documents without a provisional stage produce byte-identical reports. ErgoSense takes analysed by an earlier release keep their analysis and say so. The project file format moves forward one step to carry field sheet data, and a project holding paper entries needs 1.6.4 or later to open: an earlier build refuses it rather than open it and lose the entries.
Three things draw differently without any data changing. Smooth metallic finishes in ErgoDesign now reflect their surroundings, on existing designs and imported models alike. The ErgoSense and ErgoLens neck is shown as Neck Bending on the DGUV bands for any take analysed from this release on, and ErgoLens stills are re-zoned on open for display. And themed controls on the pages listed above now follow a live theme switch.
Nothing here rewrites an issued package. To carry the new Viewer content, studies, the animated demonstration, the range-of-motion study, the measured operator card, materials, the workload skyline and the provisional advisory, the work is marked Ready again and composed into a new package. A demonstration with animated fingers needs the 1.6.4 Viewer, and existing ErgoDesign and ErgoSense Ready marks are asked for once more after updating.