- Toward Open 3D Spatial Hypermedia

This paper discusses hypermedia aspects of the design of a Virtual Project Room. Based on ethnographic and participatory design studies of landscape architects ’ and architects ' work, prototypes for a notion of virtual project rooms, supporting remote collaboration, is developed. Since (landscape) architects work with 3D objects and environments a natural first step is to design a virtual project room as a 3D virtual environment. The current prototype, Manufaktur, utilizes open hypermedia technology to integrate documents with design models in the virtual project room. Manufaktur provides hot-linking of arbitrary MS Windows documents into the virtual project room, it supports spatial arrangement and categorization of (sub) workspaces by means of proximity, and it provides "classical " open hypermedia linking between segments of documentation. Finally, support for two modes of tightly coupled collaboration in the virtual project room is being provided by means of a session management service. Based on the experiences from design of Manufaktur we discuss design issues for the integration of hypermedia and collaborative virtual environments