Interactive 3D visualisation is increasingly used for design/review activities in urban planning and construction. However, as this becomes more wide spread user expectations of the levels of interaction and the functionality expand. Many organisations maintain rich sources of information describing the urban environment and society, supported by a distributed set of services that provide functionality. These resources present an opportunity to create new design/review environments in which groups of stakeholders may collaborate to explore and evaluate new solutions. However, using this distributed functionality and information presents new challenges in defining and managing the content of interactive design/review visual environments.

This paper presents a novel system for multi-user colocated interaction by which a group of users, viewing a common 3D visualisation, are provided with collaborative interaction through a set of distributed personal interfaces. A fundamental part of this activity is the formation of a unified, distributable model that references distributed content, and the available functionality related services provide.