Support for collaborative design reasoning in shared virtual spaces

This paper discusses collaborative design, emphasizing the elaboration and transformations of a problem space, and the role that unstructured verbal communication and graphic communication can play in these processes. An asynchronous collaborative system, called the Immersive Discussion Tool (IDT), is introduced as a means for supporting productive design exchanges. IDT allows collaborators to reason about 3-D models over the Internet using view-dependent and view-independent diagrammatic marks, dynamic simulations, geometric design surrogates and text annotations. IDT relies on VRML to view the models, with an extensive Java-based interface driving the interactive behavior, including the construction and playback of graphical annotations, the management of threaded discussions, and the management of file input/output. The development and initial implementation of IDT has revealed the difficulty of constructing complex marks in a virtual 3-D space. Possible strategies for dealing with these problems are suggested.