CIA-Tool: Kooperativinteraktives Planen in virtuellen Räumen

Abstract

In many planning tasks the planning specialist sooner or later is confronted with the necessity of presenting his/her design to the future user and altering the design if necessary. In the ideal case the iterative planning process should be carried out interactively with the user to essential reduce the duration of each step in the iterative planning spiral. Further advantages of such a general cooperation between planer and user in a design would be the reduction of costs which nearly is inseperable from the shortening of the time duration. In addition, there is the possiblity to more quickly evaluate various varients of the design.

This approach was partially already applied in a prototype for the planning of rooms [Bauer93a] wherein the main focus of the planning was on the interactive aspects and less focus was placed on the conception of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The reasons for this were the lack of suitable quality and quantity of the necessary hardware, as well as the unsolved problems of integrating several VR-devices within an application. Through a strategic allience with the British firm, Division, which include the common development of new software package, the realization of most of the concepts of the Cooperative-Interactive Application Tool (CIA-Tool) was made possible. The possibilities of the CIA-Tool with an application such as interior design was already established in 1993 ([Bauer93b], [Bauer93c]). A part of the software will be made commercial available with the next release of the product Xdvise from the Division company.