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). This paper presents two different aspects that need to be considered and/or fulfilled, in order to achieve a significant added value and degree of integration: first, the requirements of the business process, in this case mainly assembly and disassembly processes and second, requirements of the system integration of design and virtual reality. In this case, the goal of the system integration of design and VR is not to develop a new CAD system having a broader range of VR functionalities to support, for example, the verification of assembly and disassembly processes, but the goal is the integration of VR techniques with an existing CA infrastructure.