Nowadays car-manufacturing companies are working together with a lot of suppliers in order to build a perfect car. To get the best results out of these collaborations, both - car manufacturer and suppliers - already have to work closely togetherduring the product development process. Given the fact that the participants are often at different geographical locations, methods and tools have to be developed which support this kind of collaboration. Therefore the shared virtual environment systemSHAPE was implemented, which now enables the concurrent design of (not only) assembly systems within a shared virtual environment. Similar to teleconferencing, two or more participants are enabled to get connected and to examine the virtual model of anassembly system. Changes made to the model by any participant, like grasping and studying geometric objects or starting and stopping robot programs, are distributed to every connected system. By using this tool, solutions can be found very quickly,whenever there is a need for a short dated co-ordinated decision. This contribution not only describes the features of the shared virtual environment but also gives some details about the information technologies used.
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