Collaborative Whiteboard: Towards Remote CollaBoration and Interaction in Construction Design

Paper in proceeding, 2010

The need for improved collaboration and interaction in construction projects has grown significantly in recent years, especially as projects have become ever more complex. The early design stage is of particular importance for the final results as most of the building’s lifecycle characteristics are committed at this stage, and the opportunity to influence them decreases rapidly as the cost of making changes, or correcting design errors, increases dramatically. Recent advances in information technology offer methods and tools to meet this need. In view of this, a collaborative whiteboard (CollaBoard) for remote collaboration – is being developed to support mixed, geographically distributed teams. Interconnected via a network, two or more system setups allow users to interact and share information over a common, interactive vertical whiteboard, allowing experts from different disciplines access to databases through intuitive interfaces in order to integrate and optimize lifecycle-related parameters into a new product. Superimposing the live video of the remote partner – “people on content” – also allows the transfer of meta information, such as gestures, resulting in more intuitively distributed collaborative teamwork.