Virtual collaboration environment for aircraft design

This paper presents a virtual collaboration environment for aircraft design. The presented system, abbreviated as VCEAD, provides virtual prototyping and communication features for synchronous collaboration between geographically distributed designers. Concurrent design reviews on large scale objects, such as aircraft fuselage, are possible over distance due to the technological choices of the system. These include XML, VRML and Java based solutions to provide shared virtual prototypes, component identification, and attribute changes distributed over distance for collaborative review of the shared object. Awareness of collaborating partners is provided in a communication manager that can be used to launch communication tools, encompassing audio, video, collaborative drawing board, shared text and chat tool. These communication facilities are open source MBone tools. The paper introduces the domain, design rationale for the VCEAD system, and explains the functionality by presenting exemplary uses.