Collaboration and Virtual Early Prototyping 1 Chapter XIV Collaboration and Virtual Early Prototyping Using the Distributed Building Site Metaphor

Rapid Prototyping within a virtual environment offers new possibilities of working. In order to reduce the design time and define better specifications, concurrent engineering shall be addressed at the early stage of a concept phase. The presentation defines different concepts namely Virtual Prototyping, Rapid Prototyping and Virtual Early Prototyping. VEP improves the Rapid Prototyping providing important leverage on the problem of collaboration. The state of art shows that the current solutions offer a limited collaboration. Within the context of an extended team, the solutions do not address how to move easily from one style of working to another one. They do not define how to manage the rapid design of a complex product. Moreover, the different propositions suffer mainly from the client-server approach that is inefficient in many ways and limits the openness of the system. One explains also that the Internet protocols are best suited to develop collaborative services within a VEP system. That state of art enables to explain that CORBA, MPEG-4 and multimedia protocols are not adapted to solve the problem of collaboration. A case study is used to show that our solution enables an efficient collaboration. Th