Distributed Architecture for Remote Collaborative Modification of Parametric CAD Data

International audience; Companies are now using Virtual Reality (VR) for collaborative design reviews on digital mock-ups. These meetings often involve remote collaborators due to current trends towards decentralization of work organization. While lots of previous works proposed distributed architectures for implementing Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE), modifying native CAD parts in such environments is challenging. There are two main difficulties: (i) how to directly modify native CAD data (i.e. data used internally in CAD software) from the virtual environment, and (ii) how to manage collaborative modifications of such data by remote users. Most common VR-CAD applications require data conversions before the VR session and post-modifications of original CAD data afterwards. Only a few VR applications allow direct modifications of native CAD data, but they do not support remote collaboration. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture allowing collaborative modifications of native CAD data from remote and heterogeneous platforms. Technically , a VR-CAD server embedding a CAD engine is included in our architecture to load and modify native CAD data according to remote requests. A proof of concept uses our architecture to connect a wall-sized display and a CAVE-like system.