Knowledge integration for annotating in virtual environments

Byline: Stephane Aubry, Indira Thouvenin, Dominique Lenne, Shigeki Okawa Annotations in virtual environment are the means to improve communication in distant collaborative design. In the Matrics project, we develop a platform to support annotation-based collaboration and associate those annotations with a knowledge model. We present the collaborative design situations we are working on and split them into three subsituations: symmetrical collaboration, workflows and project re-exploitation. In these situations, collaboration problems often arise. We present a solution that consists in enabling the designers to directly annotate their model in the 3D-environment as well as its implementation in an application for annotating in VR environments. Then, we discuss tests on this application and the need to link the annotations to a knowledge model. We present the knowledge model, the ways to exploit it as well as experiments in order to evaluate the benefits of knowledge integration in the annotating environment.