Collaborative engineering in distributed virtual environments

To date, the most important application area of DIS/HLA technology has been training. However, there is increasing interest from other potential user communities, in particular the research, design and engineering world. Here, Distributed Virtual Environments are expected to be used in various kinds of collaborative tasks, ranging from concept studies and requirements analysis, through the actual design process, to system integration, testing, and validation. Effective collaboration between geographically remote researchers, designers and engineers requires a highly interactive and immersive distributed virtual environment to aid their decision making processes. A platform for general collaborative distributed virtual environments is currently being developed in the COVEN project within the European Advanced Communication Technology and Services (ACTS) programme. COVEN makes use of general purpose COTS VE. In order to support collaborative RD&E tasks, a number of communication primitives and special purpose virtual objects are introduced. The latter are dynamic objects which can be manipulated by the users, and influence each other’s states, for example manipulatable spreadsheets. Recently, an extension to the COVEN project has been approved that will, among other things, investigate the use of DIS/HLA technology to meet the requirements of the highly interactive collaborative applications of COVEN.