Declaration 13 Copyright Notice 14 Acknowledgements 15 1

This article details research to develop a distributed collaborative engineering environment (DCEE) system that will allow members of a geographically dispersed multidisciplinary team to collaborate during product development. This article addresses the problems of integrating the information that is generated during product development (product data) with a distributed virtual environment, and the problems of supporting multidisciplinary teams in the development process. The DCEE is an enhanced distributed virtual environment with a rich set of engineering applications and information as it provides an architecture and engineering tools that allow the direct sharing of standard product data among the users with immediate propagation of any changes. Each user has a local environment that can be configured with the tools and data that each specialist requires in the product development lifecycle. An implementation of the architecture has been built to demonstrate this approach, and its performance has also been evaluated.

In order to enhance the sense of presence within networked Virtual Environments it is important to increase the quality of physical or social interaction of participants with each other and with the environment. We beleive that this increase of quality can be achieved by realistic modeling and animation of the human body representing the participant, together with the natural behaviors of the objects in the environment. The representation of self as a realistic-looking virtual human body with natural movement helps participants not only to perceive each other and thus feel together, but also to interact with the environment in a straightforward and natural fashion. This property is further enhanced if the objects in the environment behave in a natural, expected way. In the Virtual Life Network (VLNET) system we use realistic human body representation together with a set of motor functions giving behaviors to actors and objects to reach the mentioned goals.

e developed, with functionality added to it so that the prototype can be not only looked at but "used" --- it simulates the functions of the future product faithfully enough for that. Depending on purpose the environments where virtual prototypes are used can be of varied complexity and realisticness, starting from a 3D model that can be manipulated on a workstation screen by using a mouse to one in an immersive virtual reality, manipulable with haptic interfaces for more realism. One of the central ideas behind the work of our research group is that a system based on a virtual prototype can be used effectively in reducing the communication problems between the different partners in a cooperative design. We are working with this theme in the VIRPI-project that is a part of a larger Finnish national program in increasing efficiency in product design. The aim of the VIRPI-project is to study the requirements and techniques of distributed virtual prototyping and find ways how such novel

The lack of force feedback in visual-only simulations may seriously hamper user proprioception, effectiveness and sense of immersion while manipulating virtual environments. Haptic rendering, the process of feeding back force to the user in response to interaction with the environment is sensitive to delay and can become unstable. In this paper we will describe various techniques to integrate force feedback in shared virtual simulations, dealing with significant and unpredictable delays. Three different implementations are investigated: static, collaborative and cooperative haptic virtual environments. 2 Acknowledgments This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #BCS-9058408), and partially by the Allen Innovation Award from the University of Washington Libraries. 3

This paper addresses a systems design problem of what kind of support for cooperative concept design could be incorporated into a virtual reality prototyping system. We have studied and analysed how cooperative concept design is conducted in a series of multidisciplinary design meetings. This paper collects the analysis of that material and three interviews conducted simultaneously in industrial setting. The efforts of multidisciplinary designers in search toward a common understanding of the product concept during design process are reported. Thus, work done on the product concept and on coupling different interdisciplinary perspectives are studied. It is shown, e.g., that the concept can deviate very much in the early stages of concurrent engineering process. A lot of work is also required to manage the complexity of design and differing opinions of the goal. An understanding of how cooperation in these meetings was organized is presented with implications to further research with requirements of virtual reality prototyping systems. Keywords Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Concept Design, Product Development, Virtual Prototyping

Commercial systems that are based on virtual reality tend to find very specific niche areas for commercial applications e.g. military flight simulations, entertainment. Such an approach describes the prevalent application centric approach to the design of virtual systems. An alternative approach involves the separation of the hardware implementation platform from the service applications. By doing so it would be possible to deploy a wider range of services upon the hardware platform, broadening the scope and appeal of the system. This paper describes a service layer architecture for inherently real systems, systems that are fundamentally based and coupled with the real world e.g. Augmented Reality and Telereality. Three layers of service are described, a Personal User Service, Local Area Service and Global Service Network. The Personal User Service describes user centric services that are available from personal devices they pocess e.g. mobile phone. Local Area services define the services that are available to the user from the immediate environment and Global Service Network defines the services available to the user from universal networks e.g. UMTS. An experimental system used to facilitate this service structure based on visual cells is presented and discussed.

Future 3 + generation mobile wireless systems are been designed to support high data rates in comparison to existing voice based wireless systems. The success of these new systems will partly be based on the data services it can provide. Apart from supporting traditional data (email, ftp etc.) & multimedia applications (videoconferencing, web access etc.), the combination of mobility and high speed data terminals will lead to innovative new data services e.g.