Manufacturing is defined as the making of articles in an industry. Manufacturing is the heart and soul of an industry. For an industry to excel in its field, the company must possess the latest technology in manufacturing. One such technology is “Virtual Manufacturing”.In conventional manufacturing, there is lots of time and money wasted on building the physical prototypes of the manufacturing processes to be used before the actual production starts. This takes a lot of time which can be used to optimize the product design and market the product in a better way. There is also lots of money and material wastage if more physical prototypes are required. With increasing competition in today’s world, the conventional way of setting up production processes causes the company a fortune. It was time for an innovation and this is how Virtual Manufacturing was born. The first step toward successfully launching the VM initiative was taken at a Users Workshop on VM, held in Dayton on 12-13 July 1994. The workshop was held to ensure that the needs and directions of those involved in and responsible for defense manufacturing are accommodated in the VM initiative

Virtual Reality (VR) is an exciting new technology for which the most important benefits are the ability to do human-in-the-loop, real time, "what if" scenarios, reducing development time and reducing time to deliver products to the market. Virtual reality promises a ready ability to interact in three dimensional space. In particular it is possible to provide a visual simulation of familiar real-world environments, and to make changes within such an environment.

What is Virtual Manufacturing?

Perhaps one of the most interesting and important of these recent developments is called “Virtual Manufacturing”. Often termed “The Next Revolution in Global Manufacturing”, virtual manufacturing involves the simulation of a product and the processes involved in fabrication. Virtual Manufacturing (VM) is defined to be an integrated, synthetic manufacturing environment exercised to enhance all levels of decision and control. In simple words, the vision of Virtual Manufacturing is to provide a capability to “Manufacture in the Computer”. Virtual Manufacturing (VM) is defined to be an integrated, synthetic manufacturing environment exercised to enhance all levels of decision and control.