A Message-Based Annotation System for Collaborative Design Review

Abstract

The paper illustrates a shared annotation mechanism developed within a collaborative virtual environment for design review. This represents one of the first prototypes being developed within the European Project IMPROVE and it has been designed to be used within two distinct industrial scenarios: automotive and architectural design. The key feature of the system is that its functionalities (modelling, rendering, tracking) are distributed across a network of computers performing specific tasks and that the communication among these takes place through a standardised data message exchange. This paper shows the effectiveness of this approach by focusing on the implementation of the distributed annotation feature.