Designworld: An augmented 3D virtual world for multidisciplinary, collaborative design

Abstract

Large design projects, such as those in the AEC domain, involve collaboration between designers from many different design disciplines in varying locations. Existing tools for developing and documenting designs of buildings and other artifacts tend to focus on supporting a single user from a single discipline. This paper introduces DesignWorld, a prototype system for enabling collaboration between designers from different disciplines who may be in different physical locations. DesignWorld consists of a 3D virtual world augmented with a number of web-based communication and design tools. DesignWorld uses agent technology to maintain different views of a single design in order to support multidisciplinary collaboration and address issues such as multiple representations of objects, versioning, ownership and relationships between objects from different disciplines.