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http://www.sdsc.edu/~johnson/papers/ACM_1998/cg_1998may.html 

http://www.digiplay.info/taxonomy/term/2585 

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/sciencesim-a-virtual-environment-for-collaborative-

visualization-and-experimentation/ 

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/slatebox-beta-%E2%80%93-a-simple-and-quick-collaborative-

visualization-tool/ 

Collaborative VisualisationVisualisation has a different meaning to different people. However, it can be loosely defined asthe process of representing abstract data as images that can aid in understanding the meaning of 

the data. So for some people, it might be the ability to see their designs as life like as possible, or it could be interpreting the geological data from the surface of Mars - so you can see different

disciplines have different requirements for visualisation. However, the common theme that usersof visualisation have is they wish to gain insight into their data. The car designer wants to see

how the car, that hasn't been built, will look in different environments, or in different lightingconditions. The oil company geologists visualise their data to find the most advantageous site for 

their next drill platform - potentially saving them millions of pounds. The architect wishes to see

how his building will look in the place where it will be built.

How do we Visualise? 

People use computers to generate their data and typically a monitor to see what they havecreated, usually all done in isolation. The data explosion has hit every aspect of our working

lives, we can generate models of the most complex environments down to the very last detail, wecan design entire planes and ships down to the last nut and bolt. Computers are now generating

oceans of data, which would have left the user drowning in a sea of numbers a few years ago for example, car companies use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to model their cars crashing. The

average computer on everyones desk is faster than the supercomputer of yesterday, adding to the

data explosion.

However, with this increase in data, the actual size of the monitor that people use has hardly

changed in the recent times. It has not kept pace with the speed of the processor, indeed, untilrecently the standard workstation resolution was 1280x1024. So the fact is, we are looking at

more and more data on the same resolution screen, this means that the detail that we arecalculating is becoming so small on the screen that we cannot see it. To see the detail, the user 

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would have to constantly have to zoom in and zoom out again to identify detail, losing the bigger picture.

As our projects have increased in size and complexity, no one single person can have knowledge

of every single aspect of the project; be this drug discovery, or how an engine fits into a car 

assembly. We have created our own islands of knowledge.

Visualisation can bridge these two problems by creating large collaborative systems, that take the

software and display it on much higher resolution displays, allowing our research and designteams to collaborate together.

R emote Collaboration 

Collaboration is not just limited to groups of people together. With advent of high speednetworks, we can collaborate remotely, via application sharing and using typically a

teleconferencing application.

It is not unusual now for a company's experts to be located in different locations given thecomplexity of todays products. Today, instead of travelling many miles for meetings, remote

collaboration can be used to reduce travel time and increase productivity. IBM Deep ComputingVisualisation (DCV) software can be used to collaborate with dis-located groups, it allowing

users to see the same application in a number of different locations. This has a number of benefits:

y  R educed travellingy  Data does not have to leave the company, data security

y  Convenience

We have Collaborated with IBM and Fakespace (a Mechdyne company) to provide our 

visualisation solutions. We set out in the following pages a number of examples taken fromvarious industries.

But let us remember 

"So how will digital prototyping ultimately succeed? It¶s not hardware or software that makes or 

breaks digital prototyping - it¶s people. Great people can overcome marginal or bad hardwareand software, but marginal people can cause the best hardware and software to fail. Digital

prototyping is really no different than any other technical endeavour with regard to the absoluteimportance of the people factor in its success.´