Introduction and Basic Principles

Abstract

The technology described in this book was originally referred to as rapid prototyping. The term rapid prototyping (RP) is used in a variety of industries to describe a process for rapidly creating a system or part representation before final release or commercialization. In other words, the emphasis is on creating something quickly and that the output is a prototype or basis model from which further models and eventually the final product will be derived. Management consultants and software engineers both use the term rapid prototyping to describe a process of developing business and software solutions in a piecewise fashion that allows clients and other stakeholders to test ideas and provide feedback during the development process. In a product development context, the term rapid prototyping was used widely to describe technologies which created physical prototypes directly from digital data. This text is about these latter technologies, first developed for prototyping, but now used for many more purposes.