Space Envelope?

Question

Can an engineer or someone in the know tell me what space envelope means?, regarding the design of lets say a bus seat.

Answer 1

this would consider the physical space required for comfort and access to the seat. like if you will bang your head when you get up or if the seat isn`t wide enough

that sort of thing think of it as a box around the item in question and if it is big enough to do what you need to do in it

have fun

Answer 2

A space envelope model is a CAD-type boundary description. Instead of modeling a single object (or solid), a space envelope encloses a bubble of empty space. The advantage is that in any given view, there may be any number of objects, this number being difficult to determine from pixel-data alone. However, there is always one and only one visible volume of unoccupied space. Once a model has been constructed defining the space envelope, higher-order operations may be applied to reason about the scene's content. For instance, surface geometries and topology could yield insight into the number of visible objects.