A "Collaboratory" is a lightweight application component allowing project teams to collaborate and share data and insight while distributed over a network, using intuitive visual navigation techniques. The innovation can be summarised as the integration of network technology used in collaborative games with 3D data navigation techniques and based on a low-level, fine-grained, customisable "atomic" visualization component infrastructure. This paper is also a blueprint to inform researchers and software engineers about the possibility to extend existing visualisation applications to support collaboration, e.g. making it easier to "collaboratize" visualization applications based on Microsoft?s DirectX class library.