Conceived as an ergonomic assessment and virtual human prototyping system for NASA space shuttle development, it soon gathered funding from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army for dismounted soldier simulation, from the U.S. Air Force for maintenance simulation, and from various other government and corporate users for their own applications.
In 1996 the software was spun off into a privately held company and is now sold as an ergonomic human simulation toolkit (called Tecnomatix Jack) by Siemens.
[1] The research and development of the Jack system have led to such standards as H-anim and MPEG4 Body Animation Parameters.
It was sold to Engineering Animation, Inc. (EAI) which later was acquired by Unigraphics Solutions (UGS).
Unigraphics was then re-incorporated into Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and then spun off again as a privately held company called UGS.