Virtual environments for dynamically reconfigurable Concurrent/Collaborative Engineering "virtual" teams

The paper presents a hypothesis, and its experimental validation, on virtual environments, i.e. Virtual Reality based interfaces, which hide the real appearance of their interlocutors, as enablers, or facilitators, of performance of dynamically reconfigurable "virtual" teams in Concurrent/Collaborative Engineering. Design teams' dynamic reconfiguration may either be a need for (1) their structural and functional optimization (e.g. for improving their productivity) or (2) to support dissipatedness of the design teams in Chaordic Manufacturing Systems. The effect that virtual environments have on reducing the "set-up" time when switching from one interlocutor to another during the communication process is evaluated. The proof of the hypothesis is presented through a statistical evaluation of the experiment. (c) 2008 CIRP.