Specialist applications will necessitate participants being able to view life size models of technical data (e.g. oil rigs sections, car design etc), where critical decisions can be made before committing substantial amounts of money to be spent.

Virtual environments offer a more realistically-dimensioned display space. Typically blended projectors are used to provide one (or more) seamless high definition images to be displayed in 2D or 3D (3D can be; passive stereo, active stereo or autostereoscopic).

The acronym for such specialist rooms (depending on their use) is HIVE (Highly Immersive Virtual-Reality Environment) or CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment ) – where projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of the walls of a room-sized cube.

Visualisation systems and collaboration rooms are often one and the same (if design teams in different geographical locations need to work on the same project). Therefore, it is common place that high definition live (true pixel for pixel) streaming technology is used to speed up and assist the decision process.