A Distributed Virtual Environment for Collaborative Engineering

Abstract

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.

Using a commodity high-definition television for collaborative structural biology

“…Various display paradigms exist, such as immersive environments, tabletop displays, large tiled displays, domes and geowalls (Akkiraju et al, 1996;Achalakul et al, 2004;Li et al, 2003;Maxfield et al, 1998;Forlines & Lilien, 2008;Tate et al, 2001). From the user's point of view, because there may be different points of view for looking at the same molecule, moving between viewpoints of each participant is common, and considerable time is spent recreating previous views.…”

Handling Heterogeneity in Networked Virtual Environments

“…This, in turns, allows the administrator to implement quality-of-service policies. Maxfield, Fernando, and Dew (1998) present a homogeneous NVE in which the users can register their interests as to what information they see and manipulate during the session. They study the value of being able to drop remote messages (considered as nonessential object changes) to maintain an interactive framerate within the virtual environment.…”

Human factors of it-based solutions for worldwide manufacturing web

“…However, the MSC blueprint has not defined the detailed strategies of the WMW, whether it is akin to agile manufacturing (AM; e.g., Kidd, 1997), distributed manufacturing (DM; e.g., Maxfield, Fernando, & Dew, 1998), or virtual manufacturing (VM; e.g., Lin, Minis, Nau, & Regli, 1995). Any of these manufacturing approaches, as shown in Table 1, have constraints that must be understood before they are implemented in WMW.…”