This article details research to develop a distributed collaborative engineering environment (DCEE) system that will allow members of a geographically dispersed multidisciplinary team to collaborate during product development. This article addresses the problems of integrating the information that is generated during product development (product data) with a distributed virtual environment, and the problems of supporting multidisciplinary teams in the development process. The DCEE is an enhanced distributed virtual environment with a rich set of engineering applications and information as it provides an architecture and engineering tools that allow the direct sharing of standard product data among the users with immediate propagation of any changes. Each user has a local environment that can be configured with the tools and data that each specialist requires in the product development lifecycle. An implementation of the architecture has been built to demonstrate this approach, and its performance has also been evaluated.

No abstract

No abstract

Commercial organisations that are in dispute will sometimes seek to settle their differences without resorting to legal proceedings through a process of structured and facilitated negotiation called Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR). Traditionally ADR negotiations are conducted by co-locating the mediator, witnesses, supporting evidence and representatives of each party. This paper describes a novel experiment that has been conducted at the University of Leeds to investigate whether an augmented collaborative environment could provide a realistic alternative to co-locating individuals for ADR negotiations. The individuals that took part in the experiment included an experienced mediator and practising legal representatives. The augmented collaborative environment was based on a video conferencing system that was enhanced to enable virtual artefacts representing items of evidence to be blended directly into the video streams. This experiment sits within the framework of the Court 21 Project, that is seeking to identify how new technology can be used to improve the different aspects of the legal system [10].