Development of a Web-Based Prototype for Real-Time Collaborative 3D Viewing
A collaborative 3D viewer is the recent technology that allows geographically distributed designers to view and markup the same CAD model without the need of a specific CAD system. However, most of the currently available collaborative 3D viewers only enable asynchronous collaboration among distributed designers. This paper targets the development of a Web-based real-time collaborative 3D viewer, named GlobalView, which is designed to support synchronous collaboration. In particular, the 3-tier client-server system architecture of GlobalView is illustrated and the implementation details are described according to its two main units: GlobalView Server and GlobalView Client. Finally, an application scenario of the usage of GlobalView is also illustrated. This 3D viewer will serve as one function module in our collaborative CAD system dedicated to collaborative assembly modeling.