Support for collaborative design reasoning in shared virtual spaces

✍ Scribed by David Latch Craig; Craig Zimring

• Book ID: 104358637
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 438 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0926-5805
• DOI: 10.1016/s0926-5805(00)00102-3

✦ Synopsis

This paper discusses collaborative design, emphasizing the elaboration and transformations of a problem space, and the role that unstructured verbal communication and graphic communication can play in these processes. An asynchronous Ž . collaborative system, called the Immersive Discussion Tool IDT , is introduced as a means for supporting productive design exchanges. IDT allows collaborators to reason about 3-D models over the Internet using view-dependent and view-independent diagrammatic marks, dynamic simulations, geometric design surrogates and text annotations. IDT relies on VRML to view the models, with an extensive Java-based interface driving the interactive behavior, including the construction and playback of graphical annotations, the management of threaded discussions, and the management of file inputroutput. The development and initial implementation of IDT has revealed the difficulty of constructing complex marks in a virtual 3-D space. Possible strategies for dealing with these problems are suggested.