State of the art of the virtual reality applied to design and manufacturing processes

The idea that technology can transfer a person to a different environment without any physical movement and create the illusion of interaction with the artificial environment is not new. Scientists and engineers have been dedicating their efforts to its progressive development over the last fifty years. However, most of the technological advances have been made in the last ten years, undoubtedly thanks to improvements in computer efficiency and the miniaturization of sensorization devices. Nowadays, virtual reality is successfully applied in different fields, such as telemedicine, robotics or cinematography. Following on from this success, the question arises of whether we are ready to apply it to industrial design and manufacturing processes. The lack of recent reviews on this technology applied to CAD/CAM, together with its rapid evolution over the last decade, have been the primary motivations for carrying out this study.