The early stages of the product development process are the most important ones. Decisions made here affect the success of a new product. Due to the complexity of products, a multidisciplinary knowledge is required. In the globalized world the company's internal and external experts are spread all over the world. Time and cost pressure impedes teamwork with personal attendance. As a result, personal meetings are strictly limited and teamwork is often reduced to e-mail or phone communication, combined with shared document repositories. Especially for these early stages in product development there is no suitable support by means of information technology. Creativity methods like brainstorming have shown to be valuable in this phase. But in order to support them, it is very important not to influence the user's creativity by handling an intricate computer system. Thus, we introduce a system, which allows a net-based collaboration that goes far beyond today's existing technology. In addition to typical audio and video communication, intuitive interfaces like pencil or eraser allow to work simultaneously on a shared digital workspace. Therefore the presented system does not only support net-based collaboration, but also supports co-located teams to perform team sessions in the early stages on an intuitive digital basis.

-The teamwork characterizes the early stages of the product development process. The teamwork in these early stages is characterized by simultaneous writing and sketching. Since the work is done on paper a later use of the generated ideas with computer programs is hindered. This represents a break in the logical concatenation of the product development process and thus results in a loss of information. This implies that it is necessary to provide the group with a tool that collects the information already during writing and sketching. A technical workplace is described that uses techniques from virtual reality to allow a real teamwork in these early stages. Using picture acquisition and color separation techniques different pencils can be detected simultaneously in real time on a horizontal surface. Since only active parts are detected by the picture acquisition no quantization errors can occur caused by other objects on the surface like paper, elbow or hands. The realized teamwork space offers an A1-size work area onto which a simultaneous input is possible with four pens of different color. For the construction of the device a material has to be evaluated that is suitable for a back-projection.

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Increased capacity of the network will also provide the possibility to transmit pictures and sound. This is of particular interest if speeches, presentations or lectures have to be recorded or transmitted in order to make them accessible at a different location or to a larger auditorium. Very often additional information has to be transmitted simultaneously as for example the visualization of overhead slides or PowerPoint presentations with additional annotations. Up to now this has not been possible or only with a large number of staff and financial expenditure and thus is refused in many cases. This paper describes the construction and the functionality of a digital lectern named “Speaker’s Corner” that solves the problems described above and also allows the use of conventional media.