ABSTRACT

Virtual reality is used to support the collaboration in design of manufacturing products. Most of the time, solutions focus on sophisticated communication architectures in order to satisfy general requirements of collaboration. Within the building site, workers share and split dynamically the work, join their local works automatically into a global work and achieve conciliation. The corresponding services are provided through low cost communication services available on standard Internet workstations. A generic solution allows distributing dynamically the scene graph beyond the different users. The users form a meeting to interact on the global scene while keeping the work consistent. They can resolve the choices of design through a conciliation procedure. The solution allows a low cost deployment and highly usable collaboration services. In contrast with other solutions, the collaboration services fit the design activity of manufacturing products and only use best effort communication services.

Keywords: distributed virtual reality, collaborative design, fast prototyping, collaboration services, communication services.