The paper describes the feasibility and method of the application of virtual reality technology to the grinding process, and introduces the modeling method of object entity in the environment of virtual reality. The simulation process of grinding wheels and ground surface roughness is discussed, and the computation program system of numerical simulation is compiled with Visual C++ programming language. At the same time, three-dimensional simulation models of grinding wheels and ground surface roughness are made with OpenGL tool. The choice of grinding wheels, the forecast of ground surface quality and some simulation results can be realized by interactively inputting grinding parameters. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.