Supporting collaboration and multiple views of building models in virtual worlds

Collaboration in virtual environments has the potential to support communication and collaboration in multi-disciplinary teams. Current software for documenting and developing models of buildings focuses on supporting a single user who is a specialist in the specific software used within their own discipline. In this paper we report on the research, and a proposed approach, in supporting multiple disciplines in virtual worlds. We emphasise that the views and models are founded on the functional concerns of designers and the concerns are discipline specific. An agentbased approach to representing multiple views is described, along with a virtual world environment that supports communication and collaboration. In order to prototype and develop a collaborative environment, we consider simple models in an inherently multi-user virtual world