Shifting Virtual Reality Education to the Next Level – Experiencing Remote Laboratories Through Mixed Reality

Abstract

Technical universities are more and more focusing on engineering educa- tion as a primary discipline. All along with the integration ofvarious innovative fields of application into the curriculum of prospective engineers the need for appropriate educational features into the studies also increases. Unlike exclusively theoretical studies as physics, mathematics or information sciences the education of engineers extensively relies on the integration of practical use-cases into the education process. However, not every university is able to provide technical demonstrators or labora- tories for all of the various applications in the field of engineering. Thus, it is the aim of the current paper to propose a method that enables visiting a high variety of engi- neering laboratories based on Virtual Reality. A Virtual Reality simulator is used to create and emulate remote laboratories that can be located at arbitrary places far away from their Virtual Reality representation. This way, by melting real world demon- strators with virtual environments, we enable a physically and technically accurate simulation of various engineering applications. The proof of concept is performed by the implementation and testing of a laboratory experiment that consists of two six-axis robots performing collaborative tasks.