A collaborative 3D environment for authoring design semantics

This article presents an approach to collaborative authoring of design semantics within a multiuser 3D environment. Our research unites ideas from traditional engineering design with recent work from the Semantic Web and knowledge engineering community. The system we present, Multiuser Groups for Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (MUG), serves as our research platform. it lets a team of designers-collaborating over the Internet in a shared, multimodal, 3D workspace-model a 3D layout and semantically grounded behavioral description of a product or device.