Collaborating "In" The Design

by Jim Foster

Most of us have worked on projects with other people and have had to communicate with teammates regarding design issues.  Usually it's via email, a phone call or a shout down the hall.  With all these methods of "Collaborating," it can be hard to keep track of how and why certain decisions were made, or even what the decisions were sometimes. 

In To3D we added a discussion window that lets project members have discussions "In" the design.  These notes are maintained with the design and can be associated to geometry, dimensions, views and pretty much any object in a design.  The discussions can be almost in real time, since everyone working on a design is working from a common database in the Cloud.

The example below provides a very simple interactive demonstration of the discussion capability in To3D.  To start the interactive demonstration select this link or click the image below.

Note: A browser that supports WebGL like Chrome or Firefox must be used for the demonstration to work.

 

Thursday, July 19, 2012 11:10:00 PM Categories: Cloud Collaboration Design

re: Collaborating "In" The Design

Monday, July 23, 2012 12:50:31 PM Daniel Browning

Hi Ilya, couldn't get the WebGL to go on my Firefox, but thought I'd share some ideas (perhaps already considered by you). You might look in Computer Enhanced Meeting Room (CEMR) designs, especially pen-based. The main idea is that an annotation or "jot" is associated with some part of the drawing -- that part of the drawing or model is the "context". The context area can be shown by turning down the luminance on an area of a 2-D drawing, or with 3-D markers that show the area of interest. So there's the jot and its context. Then, the meeting itself is assumed to happen serially, i.e. a model of one person having the floor at a time, which implies a meeting or conference "timeline." Jots (or digitally recorded voice, or whatever) along with their contexts, are "dropped" into the meeting timeline, which then becomes a serial record of the entire meeting. Someone can scroll through the timeline, click on a context tag, and then have the drawing, the jot, the digitized media, appear on the screen.

I'll get my WebGL working soon!

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