Multimedia Feedback Systems for Engineering
- Sandia National Laboratories
The World Wide Web has become a key tool for information sharing. Engineers and scientists are finding that the web is especially suited to publishing the graphical, multi-layered information that is typical of their work. Web pages are easier to distribute than hardcopy. Web movies have become more accessible, in many offices, than videos. Good VRML viewing software, bundled with most new PCs, has sufficient power to support many engineering needs. In addition to publishing information science and engineering has an important tradition of peer and customer review. Reports, drawings and graphs are typically printed, distributed, reviewed, marked up, and returned to the author. Adding review comments to paper is easy. When, however, the information is in electronic form, this ease of review goes away. It's hard to write on videos. It's even harder to write comments on animated 3D models. These feedback limitations reduce the value of the information overall. Fortunately, the web can also be a useful tool for collecting peer and customer review information. When properly formed, web reports, movies, and 3D animations can be readily linked to review notes. This paper describes three multimedia feed-back systems that Sandia National Laboratories has developed to tap that potential. Each system allows people to make context-sensitive comments about specific web content and electronically ties the comments back to the web content being referenced. The fuel system ties comments to specific web pages, the second system ties the comments to specific frames of digital movies, and the third ties the comments to specific times and viewpoints within 3D animations. In addition to the technologies, this paper describes how they are being used to support intelligent machine systems design at Sandia.
- Research Organization:
- Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (US); Sandia National Labs., Livermore, CA (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC04-94AL85000
- OSTI ID:
- 2828
- Report Number(s):
- SAND98-2664C
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Virtual real-time inspection of nuclear material via VRML and secure web pages
Multimedia computer support for a course in ground control