CEDAR -- Collaborative Engineering Design And Review -- proposes to advance the state of the art in collaborative virtual environments. The main idea of our research approach is to combine the power of novel interaction paradigms with the results from ethnographic observations of real world engineers and their successive evaluations to the different versions of the system. In order to keep the project focused, we will center our research on oil platform engineering activities, namely collaborative design and review. CEDAR is not bound to any particular type of technology, since we adopt a user-centered research approach where technology is not the end but the means. However, recent advances on large-scale multi-touch displays are especially attractive, because of the three-dimensional nature of the engineering design tasks we have at stake. In particular, we argue that the manipulation of CAD models can benefit significantly from natural interaction techniques. A novel set of 3D manipulation primitives based on multi-touch will be proposed, specifically suited to oil platform engineering activities.
