Distributed and collaborative design activities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

The increasing complexity of engineering artifacts and the globalization of product development necessitates a distributed and collaborative environment for design and manufacture. The future manufacturing environment will consist of a network of engineering applications, where state of the art multimedia tools and techniques will enhance closer collaboration between geographically distributed applications or design agents, virtual reality tools will allow visualization and simulation in a synthetic environment, and information exchange standards will facilitate seamless interoperation of heterogeneous applications. I provide an overview of our research activities in collaborative design.