3D collaborative interaction for aerospace industry

3D collaborative interaction raises issues like awareness of the Virtual Environment that have been well known for some time. They have been the subject of research activities that have led to some interesting results described in the literature. Unfortunately, most of these results have not yet been not implemented in the software systems daily used by industry and remains only theoretical concepts. That is why we recently started a project to transfer some of these results in the aerospace industry for the Airbus Group. Beyond this first transfer target, we also intend to measure the real gains (in real industrial conditions) for the users, and then for the company. This second goal is essential because in most publications, user testing is not satisfying (lack of real users, lack of real procedures, non significant number of subjects). In this paper, we describe the first step of this work in progress and more precisely, the basic interaction features we have developed. Currently, we are designing the first user tests.