@article {17949, title = {Collabcad: A toolkit for integrated synchronous and asynchronous sharing of cad applications}, journal = {Proceedings TeamCAD: GVU/NIST Workshop on Collaborative Design, Atlanta, GA, USA}, year = {1997}, month = {1997///}, pages = {131 - 137}, abstract = {We are developing CollabCAD, a novel software architecture and toolkit, that supports shar-ing of arbitrary user-defined objects or applications over intranets and the internet. Developers can use CollabCAD to rapidly re-engineer existing CAD applications to be collaboration-capable or build new collaboration-capable CAD applications. CollabCAD provides the following functionalities: 1. Support for fiexible forms of sharing in which users can interact with multiple presentations of CAD applications or objects. 2. asynchronous and synchronous sharing, as well as a mixture of both, 3. effective communication between users by supporting direct manipulation of user-defined objects, and a new form of sharing called para-synchronous sharing, 4. support for asymmetric collaborations between users with 1 different roles, or, 2 systems with different input-output, hardware and network capabilities. We plan to test and evaluate CollabCAD by building collaboration systems in several CAD- oriented application areas: these include virtual reality for mechanical, architectural and molec- ular CAD, and volume visualization and volume graphics for CAD applications. }, author = {Mishra,P. and Varshney, Amitabh and Kaufman,A.} }