COVISE CE (Collaborative Engineering):
Fast and Easy Collaboration
COVISE CE supports fast and easy cooperation – as well in local as in transnational networks. Your advantage: You and your partners can work on the same visualization at the same time. Even if there are thousands of miles in between - worldwide.
For many collaborative tools, sharing an application almost always means sharing all the application graphics output like the drawing of images and event input like mouse clicks or keyboard input. If a new image is drawn, each primitive, i.e. each line or polygon or text, is duplicated to the other computers participating in a collaborative session. This works fine with applications such as work processing or spreadsheets, where the data that is updated on the screen has a relatively moderate volume. But for more complex data like large CAD objects or results of numerical simulations this no longer performs satisfactorily. It is a simple calculation that for the rotation of an object with 10,000 colored triangular elements with 30 frames per second per second approximately 18 Megabytes of data must be transferred every second (10,000 elements times 3 vertices with 3 coordinates with 4 bytes each and 3 bytes for its color 30 times per second). This is obviously impossible for almost all available networks and would also be a rather inefficient usage for a high performance network.
COVISE CE does not duplicate the graphics output, but duplicates the data itself. Once the data has been duplicated, the rendering is performed completely local, i.e. it uses the graphics hardware of the workstation optimally. The only information that is sent across the network is for the synchronization of the viewpoints (usually a 4 x 4 matrix) for every frame. This technique even allows the collaborative visualization of large amounts of data via ISDN links once the data is available on both sides. The data can for example be transferred before the session or when rates are cheap during the night. If the network is fast enough the transfer can easily take place during an ongoing session.
Summary - Short information for the COVISE CE user
Bandwidth requirements depend on the user and his needs. COVISE can work with ISDN-speed as well as with LAN, WAN, and high-performance networks.
The number of partners and hosts in a session is theoretically unlimited. The largest session until today has been held with seven partners.
In order to give the user free choice of the package he likes, Video-conferencing is not included; separate video conferencing tools can reduce the performance of COVISE depending on the encoding/decoding algorithms they use. VirCinity offers (on top of COVISE CE) the ENScube Package, a solution package with additional funtions for office communication.
COVISE CE
