A shared multi-media design environment for concurrent engineering over the internet

The Internet is currently an important resource for businesses to conduct a ctivities ranging from basic communication to data exchange. In addition, t he Internet is fast becoming an important portal for concurrent engineering applications. The Virtual Design Studio (VDS) presented in this paper is to construct a v irtual design environment over the Internet in order to overcome geographic al constraints, and satisfy the major issues of concurrent engineering. Tra ditional design activities have been studied and implemented in the VDS to enable effective and efficient collaborative design. In addition, the propo sed virtual design environment also supports both the product design and di stributed communication tools used by designers. The aim of VDS is to integ rate the existing information technologies (such as remote file transfer, m ultimedia and virtual reality among others) into the design process and to explore the possibility of extending collaborative design system over the I nternet. This infrastructure will enable the establishment of distributed d esign offices in a global environment by means of the Internet. As such, co llaborative design resources can be made readily available to industries, r esearch institutions and educational institutions. CyberCAD is the application developed to support the realization of VDS. Re mote file transfer and platform independence have been implemented in Cyber CAD to enable the sharing of resources. CyberCAD provides a powerful collab orative CAD system running on a PC based platform. A multimedia communication enabled CAD conference module has been integrate d into CyberCAD. Video and audio communications provide the collaborative m ultimedia environment, which overcome the geographical limitation in tradit ional "face to face" collaboration and enhances interaction between designe rs. Drag and drop method has been adopted in the proposed CAD conference mo dule for remote design information sharing.