Interactive Room Support for Complex and Distributed Design Projects

We are investigating the design of digital 3D interaction technology embedded in a physical environment. We take as point of departure complex, collaborative industrial design projects involving heterogeneous sets of documents, and physical as well as digital 3D models. The paper introduces our notion of interactive room technology supporting industrial design and describes two examples of this technology: the Designers’ Workbench and the 3D Whiteboard, both integrated in a common distributed and collaborative infrastructure. The paper also describes a number of new easy-to-grab and lightweight interaction devices being experimented with in the interactive room environment. The interactive room technologies have all been designed with the requirement that they must seamlessly integrate both into the physical and into the digital work environment, while providing new affordances for industrial design work.