The next step of digital laboratories:
Connecting real and virtual world
Nils Höhner
nhoehner@uni-koblenz.de
University of Koblenz-Landau
Koblenz, Rhineland Palatinate
Mark Oliver Mints
mmints@uni-koblenz.de
University of Koblenz-Landau
Koblenz, Rhineland Palatinate
a)
Figure 1: Virtualization of an RFID-Measuring-Chamber. (a) virtual chamber, (b) system overview, (c) real chamber.
ABSTRACT
Lab-based learning, especially the possibility for students to get
practical experience, is a requirement for natural- & engineering
education. We want to overcome logistical problems of real laborato-
ries by creating a precise digital twin of a RFID-Measuring-Chamber.
Students will be able to perform different kinds of experiments di-
rectly in virtual reality. To diminish the disadvantage of a pure
virtual experience, a process log of the experiment is created which
gets carried out asynchronously by a robotic arm. The students
receive data and a webcam recording of the real world experiment
as feedback. We hope to combine the benefits of virtualization and
remote controlled labs to overcome most of the typical problems
inherent to lab-based learning. The effect on the learning outcome
will be evaluated over a period of two years.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Computing methodologies → Virtual reality; • Applied com-
puting → Interactive learning environments; Engineering.
KEYWORDS
Digital Lab, Virtual Reality, Engineering Education, Lab Education
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation
on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.
For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
VRCAI ’19, November 14–16, 2019, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7002-8/19/11.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3359997.3365727
Julien Rodewald
jrodewald@uni-koblenz.de
University of Koblenz-Landau
Koblenz, Rhineland Palatinate
Valentin Kammerlohr
valentin.kammerlohr@hft-stuttgart.de
University of Applied Sciences
Stuttgart, Baden-Wuerttemberg
VR - Experiment Real
Experiment Authentication Data Experiment
LMS-
Client LabServer
Server
Uploads Queries
b) Experiment-Log Experiment-Log c)
ACM Reference Format:
Nils Höhner, Julien Rodewald, Mark Oliver Mints, and Valentin Kammerlohr.
2019. The next step of digital laboratories: Connecting real and virtual
world. In The 17th International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum
and its Applications in Industry (VRCAI ’19), November 14–16, 2019, Brisbane,
QLD, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3359997.3365727
1 INTRODUCTION
Educating students on IoT and I4.0 requires practical and industry-
oriented (lab-) experience [Acatech 2016, p. 5, 6, 9]. Laboratory-
based teaching and learning has always been practiced in various
forms, as it offers students the possibility to gain essential practical
experience [Feisel and Rosa 2005], [Zubía and Alves 2011]. Never-
theless, there are some logistic problems that need to be resolved.
Most of the time the equipment is left unused, specialist personnel
must be available to supervise the trainees during their work and
in most cases the space in a laboratory is limited and few learners
can use the equipment at the same time [Zvacek 2011, p. 12]. Hence,
acquisition and staff costs are very high. Both virtualization and
remote labs are object of research to overcome these limitations.
To minimize the issues of space, staff, and cost, virtualization
has the aim to substitute real laboratories for teaching [Corter et al.
2007]. This, however, introduces new challenges: Most experiments
are hard to simulate, especially if noise of the environment is an
important factor. Additionally, the interaction through a computer
monitor introduces a virtual barrier and therefore important hands-
on experiences are lost. With the rise of head mounted virtual
reality (VR), new possibilities emerged to create true to scale labs
that can be experienced and even controlled in 3D. This, however,
alleviates just one problem and does not replace real experiments
in a laboratory.
VRCAI ’19, November 14–16, 2019, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Remote control laboratories allow students to gain practical
experiences without time and location constraints [Grodotzki et al.
2018]. It is, however, still not possible to allow multiple students
access to the same laboratory simultaneously. Furthermore, the
control interfaces differ from hands-on access.
Our approach is to combine both the ideas of virtual reality and
remote labs within a learning management system (LMS), creating a
seamless learning experience. Students sign up for experiments and
perform them in virtual reality. These experiments are recreated
asynchronously by a robot arm. Video recordings and experiment
specific data of the real experiment are automatically stored as
feedback in the LMS. The feasibility of connecting VR and a robot
arm was investigated previously in [Gruenefeld et al. 2018].
2 DIGITALIZATION OF AN
RFID-MEASURING-CHAMBER FOR VR
RFID is one of the key-technologies for IoT and I4.0, therefore, un-
derstanding the RFID basics is mandatory for students of IoT / I4.0
related programs. The RFID-Measuring-Chamber of the manufac-
turer Voyantic Ltd is used for the performance measurement of
RFID transponders (Fig. 1c). In addition to the chamber, an auto-
matic rotation system for three-dimensional measurement and the
Tagformance software for measurement and evaluation are part of
the setup. The RFID transponders to be measured are mounted on
carrier plates made of different materials for test purposes.
In this combination, the RFID-Measuring-Chamber is first opened
manually by the closing and opening mechanism. The RFID transpon-
der to be measured is then removed from the stock and inserted
into the foam device of the RFID-Measuring-Chamber, taking into
account the correct orientation. When inserting it into the foam
device, it is necessary to check the correct fastening to guarantee
correct measurement by means of the automatic rotation system.
The measuring chamber is then manually closed by the closing /
opening mechanism. The user opens the Tagformance software
and selects the appropriate test procedure. It is planned to fully
automate these steps with a robotic arm.
System Overview. As described in Fig. 1b, the VR-RFID-Measuring-
Chamber system is composed of three components: Client, LMS-
Server, Lab-Server. The client runs the actual VR-Software. The
LMS-Server runs Moodle 1 and deals with the course- and user-
management, as well as the mediation of the process description.
Finally, the Lab-Server carries out the real experiment and pro-
vides data and video feedback to the LMS. The idea is that a client
registers for a course in the VR-RFID-Measuring-Chamber in Moo-
dle. The user can log in directly via the VR environment using
the Moodle API and start the virtual experiment. The individual
steps performed by the client are stored in the form of a process
description and uploaded to the LMS server. These steps are loaded
asynchronously from the lab server of the physical experiment
and entered into a queue. If the robot arm has a free time slot, it
performs the described steps. Both the resulting data and a webcam
recording of the experiment are automatically made available to
the client in the LMS system as feedback.
1 https://moodle.org/
Höhner, et al.
Virtualization. Creating 3D assets for this application has two
main goals: create assets that correspond accurately to their real
counterparts in size and proportion, and match the appearance
as closely as possible. Possible advantages in using correct dimen-
sions when replicating real equipment lie especially in correctly
positioned points of interaction like the door handles, eliminat-
ing the requirement to adapt learned physical interactions when
transferring them to the real lab. Closely visually matching the VR
environment to the real setup aims at improving the users sense of
their own position and orientation in the VR. To this end, not only
essential equipment, but also architectural features and notable
visual landmarks from the real lab are recreated. The RFID chamber
in Fig. 1c is reconstructed using photogrammetry for reference,
manually constructing a 3D mesh over the generated data. Textures
are separately photographed from the original setup.
3 DISCUSSION
We aim to combine the benefits of virtualization and remote con-
trolled labs to overcome most of the logistical problems inherent
to lab-based learning. Moreover we want to explore whether the
learning outcome improves through the immersive experience in
virtual reality, especially if we provide results from a real site, al-
lowing students to compare expected text-book results with noisy
real world data. Beyond that, the presented architecture allows the
integration of additional labs if certain criteria are met: A 3D model
of the lab has to be created, the experiment should consist of clearly
separable steps in order to formulate a process description, and the
lab itself should provide some sort of automation. Variations would
be conceivable in the form of a pure simulation, an experiment with
mock-up results or even a lab controlled in real time.
Our system will be evaluated iteratively over the course of two
years in terms of a formative and summative evaluation. Addition-
ally, learning analytics data will be collected and analyzed. One of
many interesting aspects we are looking into is the performance of
students in real experiments after they used our system in compar-
ison to traditional preparation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
(BMBF), grants no. 16DHB2115 "DigiLab4U".
REFERENCES
Acatech. 2016. Kompetenzentwicklungsstudie Industrie 4.0: Erste Ergebnisse und
Schlussfolgerungen. München.
James Corter, Jeffrey Nickerson, Sven Esche, C Chassapis, Seongah Im, and Jing Ma.
2007. Constructing reality: A study of remote, hands-on, and simulated laboratories.
ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 14 (01 2007).
L. D. Feisel and A. J. Rosa. 2005. The Role of the Laboratory in Undergraduate Engi-
neering Education. Journal of Engineering Education (2005), 121–130.
Joshua Grodotzki, Tobias R. Ortelt, and A. Erman Tekkaya. 2018. Remote and Virtual
Labs for Engineering Education 4.0: Achievements of the ELLI project at the TU
Dortmund University. Procedia Manufacturing 26 (2018), 1349 – 1360. 46th SME
North American Manufacturing Research Conference, NAMRC 46, Texas, USA.
Uwe Gruenefeld, Tim Claudius Stratmann, Lars Prädel, Max Pfingsthorn, and Wilko
Heuten. 2018. BuildingBlocks: Head-mounted Virtual Reality for Robot Interac-
tion in Large Non-Expert Audiences. In 20th International Conference on Human-
Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services.
J. G. Zubía and G. Alves. 2011. Using Remote labs in Education: two little ducks in remote
experimentation.
S.M. Zvacek. 2011. Preface: University of Kansas, (USA). In Using Remote labs in
Education: two little ducks in remote experimentation, J. G. Zubía and G. Alves (Eds.).