1. Applications on manufactured products

In the mechanical engineering industry, in addition to the classic applications of model-makers and toolmakers, marketing and maintenance applications are becoming increasingly common, thanks to rapid prototyping technologies that enable a product to be produced in real material (see the sensor models in figure 1 ). This is often referred to as "rapid manufacturing" or "direct manufacturing".

Other applications, such as digitizing "hand-made" mechanical products for finite element calculations, are also made possible (see figure 2 )....