Virtual reality (VR) provides the ability to work with digital models in an environment that provides 3 dimensional interaction. This technology can be used to evaluate how humans interact with products before costly physical prototypes are built. One of the advantages of using VR technology in design evaluation is the ability to easily explore many different "what-if" design scenarios. One of the areas of current research in the use of VR is in assembly methods planning. As a result of prior work performed at Iowa State University, it became clear that collision detection is an important component in the development of virtual assembly methods planning applications. This paper describes the use of the Voxmap Pointshell method of collision detection as it is applied to a general purpose virtual assembly planning application.