The main aim of the cooperation project is to investigate

• the extent to which product development can take place immersively with geographically distributed,globally operating, virtual teams;
• which information- and communication technical prerequisites are necessary; and
• what changes will happen in the currently known work processes in machine- and construction industries.

Techniques and environments coming from the fields of Virtual Reality and Telepresence will be applied, extended with physically-based real-time simulation, and verified within design and construction scenarios from the aircraft, ship and machine industries. Future industrial usage of the prototypical developed cooperation techniques requires both efficient audio and video streaming and the real-time encoding of the extremely voluminous und sensible data exchange (product data and team communication) between all members of the virtual product development teams.
This research is trend setting, since it is the first time that cooperative digital product development based on immersive telepresence will be tried within traditional branches of industry. It can therefore be seen as a pilot for the globally operating German industry, and it represents a new, joint offer for the involved institutes and industries. Of significance is the inclusion of a wideband communication infrastructure, the existing, DFN (Deutsche Forschungsnetz, the German network infrastructure between research institutes and universities) supported, optical test bed (RhePhoNet), which will be used for field trials in connection with the sites in Darmstadt and Aachen.