Design Computing and Cognition DCC’08. J.S Gero (ed), 1 Distributed Collaborative Design Studio : a sketch- based environment to support rich distant collaboration Stéphane Safin, Vincent Delfosse, Catherine Elsen and Pierre Leclercq Lucid-ULg : Lab for User cognition and innovative design. University of Liège, F.R.S.-FNRS, Belgian National Research Fund, Belgium An increasing number of large scale projects requires that distant teams collaborate together remotely. At the same time, the current CAD tools only offer minimal support for partial and asynchronous interactions. The application we propose enables full synchronous and remote sketch-based collaborative design. This setup is a combination of a virtual desktop (a remote meeting table), a standard videoconference system, a gesture rec- ognition module and a networked, real-time, collaborative drawing soft- ware (SketSha). The solution as a whole is multimodal in essence (ges- tures, speech, drawing…) supporting immersive remote collaborative design. Context In a wide range of activities sectors, collaboration has been intensified, no- tably in the design domains. Collective work is increasingly organized si- multaneously (rather than sequentially as it used to be in the past). Moreo- ver, design teams are often spatially distributed, and the need for distant real-time interaction is consequently emerging. A lot of effective systems are available for the sharing of information, but most of them are asyn- chronous (e.g. databases, email…) or allow only partial interaction (e.g. phone) . Virtual reality is a promising way to respond to the challenges of such changes in organizations and processes. The Lucid-ULg proposes a system for sketch-based multimodal interaction based on the paradigm of the in-