: Riedel, O.H.; Breining, R.; Scharm, H.R.

Abstract
Most of todays engineering projects are focusing among the "real" contents on two catchword Time and costs. Improving the time to market and the reduction of the costs need innovative tool. One could be the use of Virtual Environments (VE). This paper descirbes: The demands from the Engineering Part of a Product Development Project, A classification of the use of VEs in Engineering Projects, Offers from the VE Part, Examples from research ptojects. Taking advantage of a new process chain the whole process of product development and product improvement can benefit like other fields of work from its VE-based tools: Reduction of costs and time for building prototypes gives the possibility for testing and evaluation of more variants, Faster test and evaluation through virtual testbeds, Scaleable test persons, On-line changes of parameters, Enhancing quality and effectiveness of the project drawing and the design performance, Improvement of the product quality, e.g. by integratingthe custo mer earlier and getting a better feedback of the customer, A better ecology balance by saving resources during the iteration cycles. One should not hide two minor disadvantages in using this new techniques: By now the necessary hard- and software especially the computers are expensive and in some companies the gap bet- ween the actual used tools and the proposed way is huge, may be sometimes invincible. However in our opinion both facts will come under the pressure of the market and cause the often use of virtual prototypes in VE for better products, brought to market more quickly and at lower costs.