A multimodal design environment

This paper describes a multimodal environment to support all stages of the industrial design process. The system is considered to support a designer starting at the very early stages of the design process up to the production and reengineering of physical models. This switching between the virtual and the physical world is called multimodal. To deal with all those stages, the system's architecture comprises commercially available tools as well as completely new developed components. This architecture is presented and some parts of it will be described in detail. Special emphasis is placed on the kernel of the system, a VR-modeling tool and on its user interface. An overview of the provided interfaces from and to the physical world, and an outlook on further work complete this paper.