Highlights in current research

The talk gives an overview about IGD's history and current activities in research and development in the field of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). IGD started to work in the field of CSCW 15 years ago, beginning with document sharing and white board applications. Soon, IGD started to perform research on how to share 3D documents, such as CAD models. The HP Shared 3D Viewer was one of the first products supporting collaboration with 3D CAD models in the mid 90ies. Enabling distributed VR and supporting mobile users in collaborative scenarios were the next steps along the path. Technologies such as 3D graphics compression and encoding are only one of the core techniques developed to enable collaboration with 3D graphics. Today, we see the challenges in CSCW more in the area of cross domain enginering and integration and keeping the semantics along the process.