The development and evaluation of Syco3D: A real-time collaborative 3D CAD system

Abstract

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a real-time collaborative 3D CAD system, Syco3D, which allows distributed designers in a small team to work together to build and edit virtual 3D models. A shared 3D workspace, Shared Stage, is incorporated in a conventional CAD interface and provides a number of real-time collaborative features in two main interface elements: Synchronised Stage View and Data Structure Diagram. This paper also reports on a usability experiment with two versions of the system, one with the Shared Stage module and the other without, and discusses the issues raised from the development and experiments with the real-time collaborative 3D CAD system. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.