Collaboration tools for multi-user CAD

Multi-user CAD systems developed at Brigham Young University allow simultaneous access and editing of CAD models by multiple users, bringing a “Google Docs”-type collaborative experience to CAD. This has shown great potential to increase collaboration in CAD workflows, including remote collaboration. While rudimentary tools for remote login and sharing screen views are available, their lack of CAD integration, excessive network bandwidth requirement and poor quality limit their adoption. This paper presents a CAD-integrated system that enables users to share individual CAD view and perspectives amongst the work group, offering superior collaborative user experience and reducing bandwidth usage by orders of magnitude compared to existing technology, which could dramatically increase the efficiency and quality of the design experience.