Environ: Integrating VR and CAD in Engineering Projects

Environ plays an important part in a collaborative problem-solving environment tailored to assist the control and execution of large, complex petroleum engineering projects. To aid collaboration, Environ provides a scripting layer for executing commands (locally and remotely) and resources such as annotation of engineering artifacts and synchronized navigation control. Although Environ's performance is satisfactory for numerous CAD models, its performance deserves more attention, especially because we designed it to run on desktop computers and to visualize CAD models of increasing complexity. As we mentioned before, no commercial or academic solution has completely solved the problems of CAD-VR integration. This fact restricts, but hasn't stopped, the industry's increasing use of VR systems. Meanwhile, our research related to Environ, as well as other researchers' work, is providing valuable contributions to the search for effective solutions.