Augmented prototyping - combining physical and virtual prototypes advantageously/beneficially

Immersive real-time visualisation of complex product models has been widely used within the engineering domain. In recent years a range of different VR applications have been developed for the purposes of design review and analysis. The development of virtual reality techniques lead to a significant reduction of physical models though not replacing them completely within the product development process. Specifically during the analysis and optimisation stage, e.g. in crash tests, structural optimisation, VR techniques contributed to a minimum number of physical models in use. A complete replacement of physical prototypes with its virtual counterpart though, will not be possible within the near future. Hence, a co-existence between virtual reality techniques and physical prototypes in different application areas during the development process will build the basis for further developments. This paper shows how physical and virtual prototypes could be beneficially combined, thus contributing to an improvement of the rapid product development (Augmented Prototyping).