Engineering the future: How Prespective complements Unity to power industrial digital twins

Reshaping manufacturing simulation with Prespective: A Unity case study

Industry-ready digital twin platform with real-time 3D

Prespective is a Netherlands-based software company, founded in 2006, and a Unity verified solutions partner (VSP) delivering advanced digital twin solutions for the manufacturing industry. The company’s origins can be traced back to industrial design at the Technical University of Eindhoven, where it started as a visualization company, helping unpack and explain complex technology.

Built on Unity’s real-time 3D engine, today the Prespective platform offers industrial users a highly accurate, real-time simulation environment where complex systems can be tested, validated, and optimized before any physical equipment is built. By simulating systems in pre-spect— before they’re built in the physical world—Prespective enables faster innovation, fewer physical prototypes, and greater system reliability.

The company’s philosophy is delivery of information in pre-spect (instead of in retro-spect), and mission: to empower manufacturers to solve real-world engineering challenges—virtually with unparalleled precision.

In this case study, we dive into how Prespective is helping manufacturers build better systems, accelerate product development, reduce cost and time to market, and gain competitive advantage across Europe and the U.S.

Results

• 50%+ reduction in time and cost for testing and validation
• <3 mm precision at 8 m/s speeds in continuous-flow simulations
• 3 ms programmable logic controller (PLC) connection supporting 2,000+ I/O points
• Greater alignment between engineering, sales, and customer teams through virtual configurators
• Faster sales cycles through live product visualization and interactive demos

Read on to learn how Prespective is helping the manufacturing and high-tech industry to build better systems in pre-spect and unlock meaningful ROI.

Modern manufacturing is evolving—but conventional tools can’t keep up

Today’s manufacturers face pressure to deliver smarter, more complex systems faster, with fewer errors and lower costs. But traditional prototyping methods—such as building multiple physical versions for testing—are slow, costly, and unsustainable.

While digital twins offer clear benefits, many companies are unsure where to start or hesitate due to the perceived complexity of setup, lack of integrated tools, or poor experiences with other platforms. Some of the challenges include:

• Difficulty integrating diverse 3D models and control software
• Limited accuracy of simulation tools
• High performance requirements for real-time or faster-than-real-time testing
• Fragmented software ecosystems that don’t support end-to-end validation
• Delivering systems more sustainably—both in terms of workflow efficiency and environmental impact

Some organizations build their own tools in-house, but this results in high costs, low maintainability, and slow progress.

A modular toolkit solution that brings digital twins into the real world—before it exists

Prespective set out to tackle these barriers directly, offering a modular platform that brings together visual fidelity, simulation accuracy, and seamless integration—all in Unity. From showcasing material handling systems to verifying PLC logic and simulating roll-to-roll processes, Prespective provides a virtual environment for engineering teams to test everything from layout feasibility to control software performance, and at scale.

Built for high precision, performance, and flexibility, the toolkit supports a wide variety of real-world scenarios.

Under the hood: Unity as the foundation for Prespective

Prespective is built on Unity’s real-time 3D engine, specifically designed to leverage its advanced capabilities for advanced manufacturing simulations. Using Unity’s rendering engine, Universal Render Pipeline (URP), and scripting flexibility, Prespective layers a highly accurate simulation framework directly on top of the Unity engine, offering a rich user experience in both editor and runtime environments. By leveraging Unity’s URP for high-quality rendering and its versatile scripting capabilities, Prespective seamlessly integrates a highly precise simulation framework into the Unity engine.

Prespective extends Unity’s standard features to meet the demanding requirements of high-tech manufacturing, including enhanced accuracy, complex logic, and optimized performance.

Unity provides the flexible foundation for visualization, interactivity, and cross-platform support, while Prespective adds a specialized layer for system behavior, control logic integration, and high-accuracy simulations.

Using Unity’s cross-platform capabilities, Prespective enables deployment across desktop and runtime environments and is designed to integrate into CI/CD workflows and engineering pipelines.

Here’s how Unity powers every layer of the Prespective digital twin ecosystem:

1. Seamless integration within Unity Editor

Prespective is developed directly within the Unity Editor. All digital twin modeling, simulation logic, and workflow management happens within Unity, allowing developers and engineers to leverage Unity’s interface while accessing Prespective’s domain-specific extensions.

2. Custom simulation framework built on Unity

Prespective adds a proprietary simulation layer on top of Unity. This includes deterministic motion handling, high-precision measurement tools, and real-time physics tailored for manufacturing simulation. These features ensure simulations are not only visually compelling but also behaviorally accurate and repeatable.

3. Unity Asset Manager for 3D system libraries

Unity’s asset workflows can also be utilized by Prespective to manage complex libraries of 3D machine models and production systems. Unity’s Asset Manager gives the ability to stream in large CAD and BIM models for the environment such as the factory building to allow more performance to the runtime. Using the in-built Pixyz capabilities of Unity Asset Manager, customers can import almost any CAD or 3D file, organize assets into configurable machine templates, and reuse components across digital twin projects, reducing duplication and ensuring consistency.

4. Real-time testing and validation

Unity’s high-performance rendering and scripting environment allows Prespective to support hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation. This enables customers to run automated virtual tests at high speed—including faster-than-real-time—for nightly build validation, commissioning support, and FAT (Factory Acceptance Testing).

5. Cross-platform deployment flexibility

Although primarily used on high-performance desktops for engineering simulation, Prespective’s Unity foundation means simulations can also be deployed to other platforms as needed. This flexibility allows customers to extend use cases from engineering to sales, training, or stakeholder reviews—without rebuilding core systems.

By combining Unity’s open, real-time 3D engine, with its own advanced digital twin toolkit, Prespective delivers a simulation environment that is visual, accurate, and adaptable—giving industrial users the confidence to validate systems before they are built.

With Unity, Prespective ensures that customers can create, and iterate on, digital twins without needing to learn new environments or abandon existing tools. For customers already familiar with Unity, onboarding is simple. For those who aren't, Prespective provides both the tools and expert guidance to get started.

Measurable impact: From months of testing to a single night

Transforming efficiency, accuracy, and cost savings at scale

Prespective has helped global industrial customers—particularly in the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands—replace months of manual testing with overnight simulation runs, for example:

One customer previously required multiple teams, 12 physical prototypes across separate rooms —each one manually configured and tested by a three-person team. Testing took months.

Using Prespective, the customer created a single configurable digital twin in Unity. All 12 configurations—and many more in between—were simulated automatically, faster-than-real-time, and in batch, overnight.

The result: 90%+ reduction in testing time and costs, improved quality, and faster time to deployment.

Prespective’s growing customer base now uses these tools across the product lifecycle, from sales and design to engineering and factory acceptance testing, delivering measurable impact across both engineering and commercial workflows.

Looking ahead: From smart simulation to autonomous optimization

A key roadmap priority for Prespective includes deeper Unity integration via Unity’s Asset Manager and unlocking greater support for private cloud deployments to meet enterprise security needs.

Prespective is also actively developing AI capabilities in-house with the help of Unity tools, to enable users to define a target outcome and allow the digital twin to iteratively optimize system configurations. These innovations will unlock a new era of automated, insight-driven engineering.

A smarter way to simulate, test, and sell complex systems

Prespective’s digital twin toolkit—built on Unity—empowers manufacturers to validate systems early, reduce waste, and accelerate time to market. Designed first and foremost as an engineering tool, Prespective enables software engineers to simulate and verify system behavior well before anything is built in the real world.

With Unity as its backbone and Prespective’s growing library of precision tools, the company is helping manufacturers accelerate their digital twin visions from decades away to real competitive advantage—today.