As smaller companies in a wider range of industries seek to implement virtual reality (VR) in their product development cycles, they are presented with a wide range of choices for commercial off-the-shelf hardware and software components that make up a virtual reality system. In this article, results and learning from efforts in an industry project (as well as from our continued work in this field of research) are shared, which are expected to be of practical use for the engineer in industry or researcher in academia who wishes to use VR for virtual prototyping. Some findings are presented about what VR is and is not, and advice is provided about selecting a candidate application and selecting VR system components, suggesting a list of criteria by which VR system components may be compared and selected.

Issue Section:
Application Brief
Keywords:
Virtual Reality, Virtual Prototyping, Visualization, Manipulation, Haptic Interface, virtual reality, engineering graphics, product development, rapid prototyping (industrial)
Topics:
Virtual reality, Visualization, Computer software, Product development
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 by ASME
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