Abstract: The popularity of smartphones and tablets has grown immensely in the last years and many different kinds of applications can take advantage of mobile functionalities. In special, applications that run on engineering virtual environments stand to benefit the most of a second screen for input and output. Such applications can use tablets or smartphones to help navigate the virtual world or even to access and easily view lots of data in the form of tables or graphs without disturbing the virtual world representation on the main screen. Another big advantage that mobile devices bring to the engineering applications is the capability of accessing the data on remote locations, like on oil platforms or refineries, and so allowing the field engineer to check the data or even change it on the fly. The problem is that most engineering applications are very complex and there is no easy way to implement the communication without a lot of programing effort on the application side. We propose a framework that is easily integrated with any application and adds external communication channels, adding functionalities like: collaboration with many devices, concurrency checks and handling of multiple instances of the application. As a first use of the framework, we discuss the implementation of EnvironRC, a communication channel for the 3D engineering visualization tool Environ.