SyTroN: Virtual desk for collaborative, tele-operated and tele-learning system with real devices

Abstract

Tele-training is a main issue nowadays and it is strongly motivated by the increased mobility of people. This mobility shouldn't be a limit for a good training: pertinence and efficiency have to be the core of distant training environments. In this paper, we introduce SyTroN, a tele-learning system using virtual reality and tele-operation techniques. The first aim is to propose intuitive virtual classrooms/desks supervised by a real teacher for collaborative or individual distant learning, using Internet. The second goal is to go from virtual to real: SyTroN supports the connection to real devices, potentially rare and expensive, allowing distant experimentation's abstracted by virtual tools. After 5 years of development, our work has been validated with psychologic tests, which highlight the efficiency of our global system on one year of use within an engineering school. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.