Introduction

Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies are being leveraged by the manufacturing community to improve operations in a wide variety of ways. Opportunities arise from multiple manufacturing engineering research areas which can potentially enable such technologies to provide both innovative support and solutions to improve product design, planning, manufacturing and support throughout the product life cycle. These not only extend to the manufacturing domain itself but also to other areas where engineering-type virtual manufacturing approaches are relevant to the tools and skill sets required in other domains, such as healthcare, health and safety, ergonomics and education and training, to name but a few. Such solutions and technologies must be considered from the point-of-view of both the individual engineer and their needs as well as team-based engineering when collaborative working, design reviews and data/information provenance are necessary. All of the capabilities of real time engineering interaction must be considered when interfacing with VR/AR models and associated data; this will facilitate rapid product development, agile manufacturing and product support. With careful virtual manufacturing system planning and development - including front-end design - this will enable the effective generation of downstream data and information as well as upstream feedback. These capabilities will be critical for the engineering of products through a range of contemporary concepts now very much relevant to manufacturing applications, such as digital twins, Industry4.0, intelligent asset management, etc.