A Mixed Reality annotation tool for collaborative design

The design of industrial products is a process based on the collaboration of different experts with different technical knowledge and backgrounds. For example during the first stages of the design process the shape of the product is defined by designers from the aesthetic point of view. Late in the process the same shape is analyzed by engineers and refined. Today, due to the use of different specific computer-aided tools, it happens that sometimes the representation of the product made by the different members of the design team is not the same. Then the different backgrounds of the members of the team may cause the use of different languages and concepts to represent the same information. So the exchange of information in the design team can become the bottleneck of the entire design process. This paper describes an annotation tool integrated in a Mixed Reality environment whose aim is to try to reduce the time and augment the level of collaboration. The Mixed Reality environment, in which the two phases of the definition and analysis of the shape have been integrated, makes use of a semi-immersive visualization system and some haptic technologies. The application has been validated through some user tests and the results have highlighted the potentialities of the entire application in terms of collaboration and the limits in terms interaction that are basically due to the fact that some users are still not familiar with these technologies.