An Object Server System for 3D Digital Design Collaboration

摘要

Moving through and between computer generated 3D objects we experience a Virtual world'. Virtual Worlds have created a dream-like landscape. They also have facilitated a paradigm shift for architects working with CAD tools where they now desire to "design three-dimensional spaces in an immersed way" (Strehlke and Engeli 2001). Architects are already working in computer-moderated collaborative networked organisations. A 3D Virtual World offers a different kind of collaboration. To understand how architects might design in an 'immersed way', three experiments are described. The experiments attempt to investigate how participants experience the 3D spaces within which they collaborated. In particular, the last experiment makes use of 'shared objects' in the scene. The software chosen to create these Virtual Worlds was VRML and JAVA due to their flexibility and-rapid prototyping. Where VRML differs from most CAD languages is in its openness. This paper describes an object sharing client-server architecture based on a simple multi-user system providing navigation in CosmoPlayer 2.11 ported through Netscape. The Object Server System allows multiple clients, as avatars, and objects to be manipulated in a 3D Virtual World. The system updates the transforms of the objects explicitly allowing their transform values to be shared across multiple browser sessions.