Due to growing, worldwide competition, manufacturing companieshave to employ new technologies to cut costs, improve product qualityand, more importantly, shorten the design-to-manufacturing and -assemblycycle for new products. During recent years, virtual reality (VR) hasproved its potential for the visualization and interactive manipulationof complex data. This paper describes a process for integrating aninteractive VR-based assembly simulation of a digital mockup into anexisting CAD/CAM infrastructure. The necessary hard- and softwarepreconditions for the process are explained so that it can easily beadopted by nonVR-specialists. The article outlines how assemblysimulation can improve the CAD/CAM procedures and structures, which CADmodel preparations have to be carried out and which virtual environmentrequirements have to be fulfilled. Finally, deficits of existing VRsimulation software are discussed and possible solutions and necessarydevelopments are presented
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