An Immersive Tool for Wide-Area Collaborative Design

This paper describes a virtual reality application, vrapp, for telecollaborative engineering design. The prototype system interoperates with existing software and networks (e.g. vic, Open Inventor, Alpha_1 modeling system, the Internet) while leveraging greater capabilities where available, such as the Science and Technology Center's dedicated T-1 line for high-bandwidth video and local immersive displays (e.g. head-mounted displays or FakeSpace booms). The modularity of vrapp permitted the architects of this application to write, to test, to debug, and to use vrapp for real applications without the primary code writers ever meeting face to face. By providing a rich set of extensible tools in a shared, virtual environment, vrapp gives participants a better sense of communication and presence