Entities’ representation modes and their communication effects in collaborative design for SMEs

In distributed product development, Web-enabled collaborative design system with virtual reality (VR) function is good for representing the design features of 3D product entities in design communication. However, it is too expensive and complicated for most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to implement it. This paper explains that the series of still images, which also present the same efficiency in representing the design features of 3D product entities, can be easily produced at low cost and require less Internet bandwidth. In order to certify the weaknesses of the remote collaborative design system (RCDS) for the SMEs, this research started with a preliminary study to identify the unsatisfied problems associated with the mutual understanding between multi-disciplinary product development team members when using RCDS. Further investigation was presented as the perception/recognition ability experiment, which was conducted to use three types of 3D product entities representation, namely the group of still images, image-based VR and model-based VR, to certify the efficient product data visualization for remote design communication. This research concludes that the proposed representation mode and results of the research would be helpful for SMEs, which are relatively resource-restrictive, to handle the issues of remote design communication well.