Resumen
The present article focuses on General Motors Corp. (GM), which proved fertile ground for implementing collaborative technologies for designing cars. Operations that were formerly impractical or expensive are becoming commonplace in the automotive industry through the use of virtual environments. In production use at GM since 1995, these venues have become collaborative meeting rooms, and are now linking global working groups together electronically via a shared virtual model. The collaboration among artists and engineers, as well as others in a cross-functional vehicle development team, requires an unambiguous language. For exterior aesthetics, designers rely on 2-D sketches for their fluidity and expressiveness. To move from design intent to product involves the transformation of 2-D artwork to 3-D shapes. Virtual reality (VR) helps make these electronic models appear more real. The future of collaborative design depends on more technological issues than the ones described here. For one, database management issues can be thorny in any enterprise, and are all the more challenging for globally distributed data.