Digital support for net-based teamwork in early design stages

Abstract

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.

Mixed Reality: A Survey

“…At the Innovation Center Virtual Reality (ICVR) at ETH Zurich, an ARsystem for tabletop interaction was developed which uses typical office components such as pens, rulers, notepads and erasers. to enable interaction with the computer during group work [56,57]. Multiple users can work simultaneously with real objects that are augmented by a back-projection onto the tabletop.…”