Assessment of the Use of 3D-Viewing and Mark-up Tool for Rich Network Design Communication

Though there have been many successful examples of Virtual Design Studio, there still exist unsuccessful cases in which participants felt dissatisfied or even frustrated, especially at synchronous stages of design_communication. A discussion that required designers to refer to 3D models was one of the situations where technical support was insufficient to satisfy the expectation of designers. Assuming that an interactive viewing of 3D models and use of a markup utility on a shared PC window could enhance such design communications (though this also requires network bandwidth and computational power) the author conducted experiments in design discussion between two designers to test the capability and effects of these tools for network collaborations. This paper discusses the framework and results of the experiments, and proposes the next step for system developments