Development of a web-based collaboration platform for manufacturing product and process design evaluation using virtual reality techniques

This paper describes the development of a web-based platform for collaborative process and product design evaluation. The distributed collaborative design evaluation (DiCoDEv) platform provides real-time collaboration of multiple users at different sites on the same project. The innovation concept of this platform lies in the use of virtual reality (VR) technology for the development of the working display environment that provides also navigation, immersion and interaction capabilities for all collaborative users in real time. The scope of this work is to provide an efficient robust collaboration tool for the real-time validation of a manufacturing product or process, from the early stages of the conceptual design until the latest stages of the production chain. In order to demonstrate the benefits of the virtual collaboration that DiCoDEv platform can provide for manufacturing, a pilot case with a VR environment has been developed based on the requirements of a 'real life' manufacturing company.