Collaborative Multimedia Scientific Design in SHASTRA

We address the issue of design of architectures and abstractions to implement multimedia scientific manipulation systems, and briefly describe a prototype CSCW infrastructure which we have used to implement a multi-user distributed and collaborative scientific manipulation environment on the multimedia desktop. Finally, we present example design systems to exhibit that multimedia interfaces, incorporating text, graphics, audio and video, greatly facilitate distributed and collaborative scientific design effort. SHASTRA is a distributed and collaborative geometric design and scientific manipulation environment. In this system we address the research and development of the next generation of scientific software environments where multiple users (say, a collaborative engineering design team) create, share, manipulate, analyze, simulate, and visualize complex three dimensional geometric designs over a distributed heterogeneous network of workstations and supercomputers.