Virtual (3D) collaborative environments: an improved environment for integrated product team interaction?

To shrink the cost and protracted length of total system and product development life cycles (DLCs), many organizations (including the U.S. Army) have moved away from serial to concurrent collaboration through the use of cross-functional, integrated product teams (IPTs). In addition and more recently, a growing number of these organizations are also using life size three-dimensional (3D) virtual collaborative environments (VCEs). This enabling technology provides individuals and IPTs with views almost as realistic as physical prototypes, and offers the capability to rapidly change perspectives to view the outside, inside, top, and underside of synthetic system and product model(s) - even full scale. This paper addresses and provides an answer to a central research question: do 3D VCEs provide an improved environment for IPT team interaction? The answer is yes, they do!.