Rather than waiting for a physical prototype to be complete, companies that use Digital Prototyping bring customers into the product development process early.

In addition, by reducing the number of physical prototypes required, manufacturers can trim down their material waste.

Before creating the physical prototype, users can virtually investigate many digital prototypes.

Often a physical prototype is built to model and represent some other physical object.

This is an industry first which allowed for crash testing and more, before a physical prototype was actually constructed.

In contrast to physical prototypes, which entail manufacturing time in the design.

Depending on the nature of the business, digital or physical prototypes can be initially chosen according to specific needs.

A physical prototype was then constructed and tested in order to evaluate its performance.

Reduce product development costs by minimizing the number of physical prototypes that need to be built.

Ford expects computers to bring its development time down to 24 months for 2000-model cars, while eliminating 90 percent of physical prototypes.