Virtual Prototyping - The Integration of Design and Virtual Reality

The increasing competitiveness in the manufacturing industry forces companies to reduce development costs and time, and to increase product innovation, quality and flexibility, to react quickly to new customers requirements. In this context, one of the main objectives is to replace a great part of physical mock-ups with digital models — the so called Digital Mock-ups —. Due to the fact that a considerable part of resources are invested in the early phases of the product development process to verify and planned assembly and maintenance processes, a research project has been establish in order to investigate the potential use of Virtual Reality (VR) techniques within this processes. The use of VR for this propose is normally called Virtual Prototyping (VP).