Simultaneous Interdisciplinary Teamwork on Digital Twins in a 3D Collaborative Environment

Abstract

Digital twins of product and production processes are being used more and more frequently. The reason for this are the benefits for all departments involved. Therefore, it is not only important to share an IT platform as a 3D collaboration environment with uniform data structures, so all employees can work with the same database. As well it is important to give all interdisciplinary departments the opportunity to work in a common simulation and interact with it as a digital twin of the product and production process. Each department must be enabled to add their information, to collaboratively design a working digital twin of the real product. In addition, it must be possible for several people to work together simultaneously in a shared virtual environment. Voice chat, video chat and graphic simulation features such as virtual and augmented reality must be integrated to enable collaboration and interaction with the digital twin. Another challenge is to allow multiple participants to take part in these virtual meetings simultaneously, even if they use different end devices. The paper presents a 3D collaboration environment developed in research projects based on the development environment for graphic simulations Unity3D, with the ability to include various user concepts and functions for the specialist departments and allows access for the employees as a multi-user application on different end devices.