Distributed virtual reality: supporting remote collaboration in vehicle design

Gathering a group of remotely located engineers to design a vehicle can be difficult, especially if they live in different countries. To overcome this obstacle, we-a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in the US in partnership with Germany´s National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) developed a collaborative virtual prototyping system for Caterpillar. The Virtual Prototyping System (VPS) will let engineers in Belgium and the US work together on vehicle designs using distributed virtual reality. The system supports collaborative design review and interactive redesign. Integrated real-time video transmissions let engineers see other participants in a shared virtual environment at each remote site´s viewpoint position and orientation. Any number of remotely located sites may join in the shared VE, communicating via multicast. The system has been tested with three sites at NCSA