Sharing and bridging information in a collaborative virtual environment: Application to ergonomics

The current paper aims at presenting a collaborative virtual environment usable to conduct ergonomic design sessions, involving the worker, ergonomists and engineers. The paper focuses particularly on the representation of the ergonomic evaluation and the interaction between an ergonomist and the main user (worker). An ergonomic evaluation of the postures is presented. An interaction architecture between the main user and an ergonomist based on the combination of animation modes of two linked manikins is also proposed. Preliminary results and future developments of the CVE (e.g. additional ergonomic evaluation tools, graphical enhancement, interaction enhancement,...) are then presented.