Facilitating designer-customer communication in the World Wide Web

This paper introduces how geographically distributed virtual prototyping, a new Internet technology, can be designed to facilitate designer-customer communication in product development of small electronic devices, such as mobile telephones. The research approach to understand how cooperative work happens in conceptual design is discussed with an example of requirements focusing on communication between customer and designer. Accordingly, we present the main ideas, architecture and selected software techniques of WebShaman1 which is an application built to demonstrate how distributed and synchronous virtual prototyping system could support geographically distant designer-customer communication. Furthermore, we present 'smart virtual prototyping' to elaborate the virtual prototyping techniques to be used over the World Wide Web and discuss the possible impact of virtual prototyping approach to WWW community.