An innovative scheme for model consistency in collaborative design environment

In distributed collaborative design environments, product models and virtual studios should keep consistency to create sense of sharing the world and collaboration among physically distributed users. Model consistency is usually achieved by maintaining dynamic shared states. To make those events in physical locations virtually "seen" by the other participants, networks communications are indispensable. Because of limited network bandwidths and CPU resources in distributed and collaborative design environments, to decrease communication traffic is a critical issue. In this paper, we present a "near-sight" mode, which resorts to a method of using AOI, area of interest, to reduce efficiently communications to maintain dynamic shared states.