I just downloaded the latest version of skype and for my good suprise I can share my screen. As soon as I saw this I got in contact with a collegue through skype and run Walkinside SW from VRcontext (this is the company I work for). Normally walkinside was well handled by tools like webex, which is the official tool we use to do 3D Meetings when we need to share 3D models.
I was very happy to see that skype was meeting by far many of my expectations and I could share my screen quite well. This is going to be a very useful tool for me although there is still a feature that I think is key for real 3D meetings, which is to allow the attendants to get the control of the screen, I guess you can't ask for everything in the first release :).
Just in case you're interested there are other tools from adobe (which is free), gotomeeting, vnc... but these I found not good enough when sharing 3D content.
By last I would like to mention IBM's DCV which is probably the best tool in performance but may also be the most expensive one :)
On all the projects communication and collaboration among all the members that are in the project is a key factor in order to have a successful end.
When talking about project documents, the collaboration implies that everyone in the project is using the same updated document.
Why? To avoid that two members of the same project work on different documents that don’t imply taking the same actions.
In the 3D world the same can be applied but it’s not usually the case. Normally, as the 3D models are not “official” there may be different versions of the same model the different project members are using in order to take actions and decisions.
But as said in my previous post, when handling 3D models, these need to be always updated with the latest version. When this is correctly done, end users will feel confident at the moment of taking decision or acting; otherwise these models won’t be trusted and therefore won’t be used in the important moments.
At this point there are many tools to share updated documents like for example SharePoint from Microsoft or just Google docs where you can store documents.
In the 3D world this is not so simple because the file size can be huge (over 1GB) which of course can’t be easily download over the internet. To avoid this big downloads different vendors have chosen different techniques like data streaming, virtualization and others.
As you can see there are different ways of doing this but what it’s a must is that you make sure you’re always using the latest version of the model (even if you’re just using an ftp site to have them under control)
Actually I do think that 3D is not just something that can be called luxury anymore.
As Jeff Winston, The Use of 3D Visualization in Planning and Design—Is 3D a luxury or a necessity? The 3D world can help to make decisions easier or can help people to have a better understanding of a "hidden" or no existing world, that at the moment is just virtually available.
In addition many inexpensive tools are available to share these 3D models that are created.
When talking about VR there are some tools that can be used.
As I said in previous posts, it depends on the momment; the end user could require different tools as it's not the same to require just a tool to check the work done during the design, as the one to merge the whole project into one big model, etc...
During the first phase of design, the engineers have their own tools that dependant on their design tools and others that are more independant and support quite well different file formats.