Digital Twinning Remote Laboratories for Online Practical Learning

TL;DR

This paper presents a semi-automatic method for creating digital twins of laboratory environments to facilitate remote practical learning, reducing development time and costs, especially useful during pandemic-related restrictions.

Contribution

It introduces generic models for semi-automatic virtual lab creation and demonstrates their application through a case study in electrical laboratory tutorials.

Findings

Enabled quicker virtual lab development

Reduced need for specialized content creators

Validated approach through a practical case study

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has demonstrated a need for remote learning and virtual learning applications such as virtual reality (VR) and tablet-based solutions. Creating complex learning scenarios by developers is highly time-consuming and can take over a year. It is also costly to employ teams of system analysts, developers and 3D artists. There is a requirement to provide a simple method to enable lecturers to create their own content for their laboratory tutorials. Research has been undertaken into developing generic models to enable the semi-automatic creation of a virtual learning tools for subjects that require practical interactions with the lab resources. In addition to the system for creating digital twins, a case study describing the creation of a virtual learning application for an electrical laboratory tutorial has been presented.