VirDe: A new virtual reality design approach

Virtual reality (VR), even if it does not representany more a novel technology, is one of the most powerfultool to help designers during the development of new pro-jects. This is proved by very numerous research activitiesrelated to this field. In this research, we have studied a newway to approach the development of a product. We presentthe ongoing development of a system, called VirDe, acronymof virtual design, which can allow the designers to performthe whole design process, from the modelling phase to thefinite element method (FEM) simulation analysis, in a vir-tual reality environment. This newmethod allows remarkabletime andmoney saving in the overall product design process,but the most important contribution of VirDe is that, as far aswe concerned, there is no known similar approach which hasbeen studying the simultaneous combination of CAD, FEMand virtual environment (VE).