A collaborative design framework in a distributed virtual environment

This paper proposes a new approach to designing products and crafted objects in a collaborative virtual environment. A special attention is paid on an early design stage. A framework is defined to efficiently share 3D shapes and deformation patterns created in the cooperative design process. Then, a 30 object representation method is explained to visualize smooth and natural shapes without demanding a large amount of geometric information. Network traffic required to share the 30 objects can significantly be reduced Additionally the paper proposes a concept and its functions to share not only the 30 digital data, but also expert's skills and experiences in the modeling task. A data sharing strategy called "client-weighted architecture " also is discussed to offload some server 5 burden to the clients, preventing the server from being a bottleneck in a large-scale distributed system.