Research on collaborative virtual environment for 3D product design

Collaborative virtual environment for product design occurs between people and often involves 3D objects. Fruitful cooperation is helped by natural and intuitive way of communication and interaction, for which responsiveness and consistency are leading factors. In order to guarantee consistency and improve responsiveness, a novel concurrency control scheme is first proposed. In our scheme, non-exclusive concurrent manipulations are merged so as to undo a small quantity of manipulations rather than all the operations triggered by users who are not granted, therefore, a majority of concurrent operations are collision-free and executed immediately to maximize responsiveness. Moreover, notification and visual indicator mechanism are used to avoid unnecessary concurrency collision. The implementation of collaborative virtual environment named VRCAD is then introduced in detail, including system architecture, concurrency control strategy and communication facilities. Experiment and practice show that our concurrency control scheme is effective and efficient for collaborative virtual environment involving 3D objects.