The DMM project under Center for Multimedia is among other things focusing on multimedia support for distributed collaboration in companies and educational set-tings. A LEGO Futura project was studied in 1998 as a case of distributed industrial design. This project revealed a number of challenges in supporting distributed workgroups working with a mixture of physical and digital material. The Lego de-signers were working with combinations of email, fax, paper drawings, CAD, video, foam, plastic and other materials; and they were distributed over 4 different sites world wide. It was necessary to develop new tools and new ways of working to accomplish design “around the clock” where the different groups took over and contin-ued working on the common project in a different time zone in a different place. The DMM project explores technological and organizational solutions for handling these challenges through the notion of a virtual project room.

Partners

• Lego (ended 1999).
• The Danish Technical University

Since Lego left the project, virtual project room idea has been elaborated together with architects/designers from the EU project DESARTE, architects from the Aarhus School of Architecture as well as designers from a couple of small design studios in Århus.

Goals
To develop software infrastructures and a Virtual Project Room demonstrator supporting distributed design collaboration utilizing computer support for heterogeneous materials supplemented with Mediaspace based communication.

Themes
To combine the basic open hypermedia, collaborative VR and mediaspace software in a collaboration supporting physical and net based set-up of a virtual project room. The Virtual Project Room demonstrator is being built in the Interactive Workspace lab.

Expected results

• Running Virtual Project Room demonstrator
• Prototypes of general open hypermedia, collaborative VR and mediaspace software
• Theoretical papers published in international conferences and journals.

People

• Kaj Grønbæk
• Jannie Friis-Kristensen
• Michael Bang Nielsen
• Peter Ørbæk

This project is completed.

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