Development of the interactive virtual laboratory for fundamental mechanics – iMechLab

Virtual field trips are transforming education in biology and other place-based disciplines – and not just since Covid-19 has imposed social distancing constraints. Efficient methods for content creation, combined with affordable immersive technology, provide the opportunity to integrate immersive experiences into ever-larger classes. However, many aspects of how immersive experiences can enrich and improve learning in place-based education are still not well understood. We present an empirical study, conducted in a large undergraduate ecology class, comparing students, that experienced an immersive virtual version of a field trip to a biological preserve as preparation for a later actual field trip to the site, with a control group that visited the real site but without having had the virtual experience. Within the virtual experience group, we also varied the quality of the headset. The VR field trip was well received for raising spatial awareness and also motivation and interest. Students ranked it higher than any traditional means with regard to achieving a high level of preparedness for the actual field trip. In contrast, no statistically significant evidence was found for differences in perceived learning outcome and enjoyment of the actual field trip.

This paper constructs an immersive multimedia virtual interactive experience technology with the Great Wall World Heritage Site as the experimental object. By analyzing the VR vision system and algorithm, the process of stereo vision perception and the general algorithm of somatic image production are explained. The distance equation and depth calculation in stereoscopic projection are studied, and the virtual interactive experience technology is constructed and applied to the World Heritage Site of the Great Wall. The result data show that the immersive multimedia virtual interactive experience technology highlights the real feeling of users more, in which the model has 50% of the influence on the real feeling, the mapping has 15%, the lighting has 15%, and the rendering has 10%. The youth population has a higher percentage of interest in the virtual field, accounting for 50%, 65%, and 60%, respectively, while the middle-aged stage has a more average degree of interest in the virtual field, with 50% of the average interest, 30% of happy to experience, 25% of not interested and 50% of interested. This thesis is conducive to enriching the project of the Great Wall World Heritage Site and providing an effective reference for technological innovation of immersive multimedia virtual interactive experience.

This review explores the impact and potential of virtual laboratories in promoting inclusive chemistry education for students with disabilities. Despite the potential of virtual laboratories to eliminate physical, sensory, and cognitive barriers in chemistry education, students with disabilities often face numerous challenges. This paper provides an overview of these obstacles and discusses ways to overcome them. With a focus on recent research findings and case studies, the review highlights the effectiveness of virtual labs in supporting independent learning, enhancing engagement, and improving performance among students with disabilities. However, it also emphasizes the need for greater accessibility in virtual lab design, adequate educator training, and the addressing of technical issues and attitudes towards virtual labs. Looking forward, the review considers the potential role of virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and data analytics in creating immersive, personalized, and data-driven virtual lab experiences. It concludes that, while hurdles remain, virtual laboratories offer substantial opportunities to transform chemistry education for students with disabilities, ensuring it is more inclusive, engaging, and effective. With concerted efforts from all stakeholders, virtual laboratories can become a pivotal tool in shaping the future of inclusive chemistry education.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in virtual practical labs is revolutionizing the education sector by providing immersive, adaptive, and cost-effective learning experiences. Virtual labs offer significant advantages, such as flexibility, scalability, and accessibility. This paper explores the current state of AI-driven virtual labs, their benefits, challenges, and future prospect, especially in the context of STEM education and research.We analyse AI applications in laboratory simulations, personalized learning, automated assessment, and real-time feedback. Virtual practical lab powered by AI – enhance Virtual Practical labs provide impressive, interactive ,and personalized learning experience, enabling students to conduct experiments in simulated environment that conduct mimic real- world scenarios .Furthermore, we discuss ethical considerations, technological advancements, and case studies of AI-based virtual labs in science, engineering, and medical education. It’s impact on modern education, and the challenges associated with the implementation. The research concludes with recommendations for optimizing AI in virtual practical labs for enhanced pedagogical outcomes.

Physics is fundamental in influencing students’ understanding of the world around them. However, physics concepts are complex for most students, especially in traditional classrooms that focus heavily on theoretical instruction. These results, in most cases, indicate disengagement, low retention levels, and elevated anxiety. One of the more common areas of difficulty is projectile motion, in which visualization and interaction ultimately give a better understanding. This research measures the effectiveness of virtual laboratories, the PhET Projectile Motion Simulator, in increasing Grade 9 students’ knowledge of projectile motion. The study used a pre-experimental design with purposive sampling of 38 students from Section Scorpio. Data were collected through a three-part instrument covering demographics, ICT effectiveness, and projectile motion assessment. Students completed a pre-test, used the PhET simulator as an intervention, and then took a post-test. Paired t-tests measured score improvement, while regression analysis examined relationships between variables. The PhET Projectile Motion Simulator significantly improved students’ understanding of projectile motion, with the majority moving from “Beginning” pre-test scores to “Advanced” post-test scores. A paired t-test verified this gain as significant, demonstrating the effectiveness of virtual labs in improving academic achievement. Although female students performed well in the pre-test, post-test results did not express any meaningful difference between the sexes, meaning that the virtual lab narrowed performance disparities. Moreover, outcomes and perceptions did not differ by sex or age, demonstrating the inclusiveness of the tool. Students also stated that the virtual lab was well designed and executed, with a composite mean of 3.48 under “agree”, suitable for entertaining, and a better alternative than the conventional approaches. Although the findings suggest the usefulness of the simulator, limitations such as the absence of a control group and the possibility of response bias from data of reported responses by the participants take away the perspective of long-term retention due to the short intervention time. The narrow scope applied to one issue also narrows the application to other areas of physics.

This paper provides development of a virtual laboratorium for the subject of digital engineering. The virtual digital engineering laboratory based on mobile virtual reality is a finding that can be used for replacing a real laboratory. Using a virtual laboratory can be conducted a learning and teaching process at anytime and anywhere as long as it has an android device. This study applies a virtual laboratory to mobile virtual reality for a virtual digital engineering laboratory. The results of this study were fuctional application software to learn how to apply a virtual digital engineering laboratory through mobile virtual reality technology. A lot of components and circuits of logic gate can be simulated in this virtual laboratorium. This study presents a simple Android-based virtual tools for the visualization and investigation in real time of circuits of logic gates without signal disturbances. The package can be used as an educational tool in various lectures or homework to aid teaching digital engineering theory or practically.

This work aims to explore the application potential of utilizing the rich medium of olfaction in Immersive Virtual Experiences (IVEs) by engaging a broader range of non-expert users. Considering the inherent properties of scent (e.g., the absence of base odors and storage challenges) and the diverse application demands in IVEs, we introduce OdorCarousel. This design tool encompasses (1) a tiny, lightweight odor-emitting device that integrates with VR headsets and can store 25 distinct aromas. We conducted user-involved technical tests on scent release performance, focusing on identifying odor type, intensity, and transitions. (2) Based on two types of smell interactions in IVEs (active and passive), we devised and implemented three Unreal Engine-based olfactory interaction blueprints and user interfaces facilitating design. A case study illustrates the operation and design process of using OdorCarousel. We recruited 17 participants for a workshop-based user study, successfully executing six concept designs validating the usability and feasibility of OdorCarousel. Finally, we analyzed the design results and the olfactory interaction intentions, discussing the multi-dimensional potential and considerations of smell-enhanced virtual experiences and OdorCarousel, providing design guidance for future works.

SummaryA Boundary Element based Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (BE‐DDA) method is developed by implementing the improved dual reciprocity boundary element method into the open close iterations based DDA. This newly developed BE‐DDA is capable of simulating both the deformation and movement of blocks in a blocky system. Based on geometry updating, it adopts an incremental dynamic formulation taking into consideration initial stresses and dealing with external concentrated and contact forces conveniently. The boundaries of each block in the discrete blocky system are discretized with boundary elements while the domain of each block is divided into internal cells only for the integration of the domain integral of the initial stress term. The contact forces among blocks are treated as concentrated forces and the open–close iterations are applied to ensure the computational accuracy of block interactions. In the current method, an implicit time integration scheme is adopted for numerical stability. Three examples are used to show the effectiveness of the algorithm in simulating block movement, sliding, deformation and interaction of blocks. At last, block toppling and tunnel stability examples are conducted to demonstrate that the BE‐DDA is applicable for simulation of blocky systems. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have gained momentum in various fields, including art and design, where it plays a significant role in modelling, prototyping, and testing. However, most VR headsets offer only visual and auditory inputs, leaving other senses unintrigued. This study has two objectives: First, to investigate whether a physical prop can create a more immersive experience. Second, to establish the relationship between the physical prop and memory retention of the virtual experience. Two VR rollercoaster conditions were created: one where participants simply sat on a chair, and another where they were secured in with a harness. Various qualitative and quantitative data collection methods were used, including physiological, observational, and self-reporting techniques. Biosensors were used to measure heart rate, breathing rate, skin conductance and brain activity, in addition to a survey. Early results confirm a positive correlation, with varying degrees, between the use of props in immersion and memory retention.

The virtual laboratory on cybernetics illustrates main results of the paper. Development of an educational tool in LabVIEW and its integration in remote laboratory of automatic control

Controlling Gameplay

The adoption of immersive virtual experiences (IVEs) opened new research lines where the impact of realism is being studied, allowing developers to focus resources on realism factors proven to improve the user experience the most. We analyzed papers that compared different levels of realism and evaluated their impact on user experience. Exploratorily, we also synthesized the realism terms used by authors. From 1,300 initial documents, 79 met the eligibility criteria. Overall, most of the studies reported that higher realism has a positive impact on user experience. These data allow a better understanding of realism in IVEs, guiding future R&D.

Introduction This essay is very much an anxious response to an earlier article, "Controlling Gameplay", that I wrote for M/C about gameplay: the immersive, visceral experience of playing computer and video games. I argued that gameplay concerns the event status of playing computer and video games, and that as such it exceeds the symbolic content of games. Now, I continue to be troubled by the implications of this assertion -- does it not give up too much ground gained by the understanding that social practices such as gaming are socially constructed? Does it not return us to all of the problems associated with claims of access to an essential, authentic experience? In short, it becomes very difficult to contest or question such claims. The term gameplay may well function to depoliticise computer gaming; at least if the domain of the properly sociopolitical is understood as the symbolic field! -- and perhaps we shouldn't concede this point too quickly. In the previous article did I almost against myself end up fetishising the technological through the postulation of this sublime experience? The Fetish & Desire You may well be wondering what any of this has got to do with desire. Well, first let me fill you in on the research context out of which these essays emerge. For the past three years I have been undertaking ethnographic research on computer gaming: first, by participating in online gamer fan activities; and second, in an enterprise ethnographic study of Auran, a computer game development company situated in Brisbane, Australia. "Controlling Gameplay" is clearly marked by my immersion and entanglement in an ethnographic relationship with online gamers. The material on which it is based came from spending up to 25 hours a week online playing and discussing games. The point of these comments is not simply to establish my credentials as a gamer, nor to embarrassingly distance myself from 'going native' by making the appropriate gestures about reflexivity. Rather, I insist on these moments of fetishistic disavowal and illusion as a necessary condition of doing ethnographies. This shifts us from the domain of desire to what Slavoj Zizek, following Lacan, theorises as enjoyment. In the introduction to "Controlling Gameplay" I made the banal point that computer game software is a commodity. Computer games offer an example of the informational commodity circulating through the networks of informational capitalism. This is basically the bottom line of gaming: big business. Zizek carefully outlines that central to the Marxist understanding of commodity fetishism -- the displacement of relations among people onto relations among things -- is a fascination for some kind of mysterious 'content' that is presumed to be hidden by the form of commodities (Sublime Object 16-22). An example of this is the cultural studies academic doing ethnographic research, and believing that his work offers "something more", a potential critical edge, than just the commodification and corporatisation of academic work. It would appear, at least initially, that this is precisely how gameplay is working: the hidden technological sublime behind the empty form of the informational commodity. The problem for critical analysis then becomes that of insisting on asking the question of why this 'content' of gameplay is affirmed in the game's particular status of the commodity form. We are not interested in disclosing "the secret behind the form but the secret of this form itself" (Sublime Object 15). In discussions many gamers would insist on the fact that gameplay is simply the fun factor of playing computer games: nothing more and nothing less. Others would insist on refusing to finally fill in this secret content. After describing gameplay as having something to do with an immersive experience of escapism a gamer would invariably move on to suggest that it perhaps involved the design of a good interface that allows the player to seamlessly participate in the game; or it is to do with quality game-design, a careful balancing of various features that define a particular genre. Or it is a skill developed and honed by many hours of gaming; intense gameplay is an insider's experience that is used to define your belonging as a 'hard-core gamer with cred' -- if it has to be explained and described to you, well, you just won't get it, will you? In the movement of these discussions and exchanges desire is not so much to be found or discovered in the hidden content of an essential, authentic experience that is gameplay, but rather it is right there on the surface, in the work of these displacements. If anything then, unconscious desire is not a deep interior experience of gameplay but in the very form of this movement, in the work that is done to elaborate and produce the effect of a hidden content. And the question arises: what is being avoided or obfuscated in this movement that perhaps has nothing at all to do with an experience of gameplay or even desire for that matter? I will return to this question in a moment. The important step here is not to become overly dazzled by this 'content' of gameplay, but instead to ask the question of why it assumes the form of a commodity. But why this focus on the commodity-form, and the process of fetishistic inversion. After all there is a lot more at stake here than simply the commodity-form or some kind of economic reductionism, essentialism or substantialism. There is also the fascinating power of attraction that this "something more" can exert on academic work. This has to do with the status of a sublime materiality that persists beyond the physical materiality of an object in the networks of business, or even that of an object-cause for intersubjective desire played out in the game of ethnographic research. It is precisely this persistence that is so troubling. But is this interest in fetishistic disavowal, the insistence on "something more", simply a more refined type of traditional ideology critique? That is, is it once more a matter of the illusory knowledge or beliefs of misguided naive gamers which the critical intellectual will come along and tear down, to reveal the true state of affairs -- that there is really nothing there except perhaps a complex, overdetermined effect of socioeconomic processes, a social construction if you like? Is all of this concern with the fetish simply an epistemological and monstrous game played out in the interiority of the thinking subject that has in fact very little, if anything, to do with the effective materiality of the complex assemblage that is computer gaming. Perhaps a shift to the materiality of the processes and objects involved in the production of computer gaming would help us to leave behind the problem of the fetish as some tired epistemological quandary about illusory belief. After all, is not the very idea of commodity fetishism based on a rather tired and limiting opposition between people and things? The Factish In his recent Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Bruno Latour attacks the notion of the fetish and the modern critical subject that he believes is behind it. Latour's actor-network theory (nicely explained in Sean Aylward Smith's recent article for M/C, "Where Does the Body End?") works to displace the assumed divide between subjects and objects, particularly humans and nonhumans. This is often theorised through richly detailed ethnographic studies that follow the associations between humans and nonhumans that make up the assemblages and collectivities of scientific practice and technological projects. In Pandora's Hope Latour takes aim at the critical gesture of the iconoclast, the modern critic, who seeks to expose the fetish as "something that is nothing in itself, but simply the blank screen onto which we have projected, erroneously, our fancies, our labor, our hopes and passions". A problem for the anti-fetishist is the assumption that people naively believe in the inherent, mysterious qualities of the object in the first place. Anti-fetishism is not so much about the qualities or status of the object and our relations to it, but more a mode of argument: "it is always an accusation. Some person, or some people, are accused of being taken in -- or worse, of cynically manipulating credulous believers -- by someone who is sure of escaping from this illusion and wants to free the others as well: either from naive belief or from being manipulative. But if anti-fetishism is clearly an accusation, it is not a description of what happens with those who believe or are manipulated" (270). Latour argues that the problem of fetishism is all in the mind of the critical thinker. Believing himself disconnected from the realm of things and objects, this monstrous "mind in the vat" "invents the notion of belief and manipulation and projects this notion upon a situation in which the fetish plays an entirely different role" (270). Latour proposes that we shift our attention to the status of the fetish as a quasi-object or factish. The factish has to be fabricated, made, and invented; as such it has a complex and variable ontology in which it is entangled within collective practice. The status of the factish is all about the associations between humans and nonhumans and refuses the disabling opposition between subject and object, epistemology and ontology, internal belief and external world. The modern critic's belief that others believe functions to render invisible the complicated practice through which the categories are mixed and factishes are constructed. To replace all of this Latour suggests that we adopt a heterogeneous ontology in which we externalise belief "among the multiplicity of nonhumans" (284) -- in short that we recognise the ontological content of beliefs, and grant ontology back to nonhuman entities (273-88). By t

The adoption of Virtual Labs (VLs) as a pedagogical tool in higher education is rapidly increasing, especially with the recent shift towards remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. VLs offer a digital alternative to traditional laboratory settings, employing computer graphics, simulations, and interactive models to create immersive and interactive learning experiences. While the pedagogical benefits of VLs are well-established, their potential contribution to sustainability within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) remains ambiguous. This paper aims to address this ambiguity by conducting a literature review to examine the sustainability implications of adopting VLs in HEIs. This literature review reveals that VLs have the potential to enhance sustainability in HEIs across multiple dimensions. However, the literature highlights challenges and limitations associated with implementing VLs despite the positive indications. These include issues related to usability, technical challenges, and the potential costs associated with the adoption of VLs. This literature review suggests the need for further research on the adoption of VLs in HEIs, specifically in relation to achieving the SDGs. It emphasises the importance of considering pedagogical aspects and implementing innovative teaching practices to maximise the long-term effectiveness of VLs. By shedding light on the intersection of VLs and sustainability in HEIs, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how adoption of VLs, can foster a stronger connection between people, the environment, and pedagogy, creating the way for a more sustainable and inclusive future of education.

Virtual laboratories are transformative tools in science education, yet comprehensive reviews of their prospects are limited. This study addresses this gap through a bibliometric analysis of 218 articles published between 2013 and 2023. Key findings included: (1) research has evolved from initial exploration to rapid expansion; (2) virtual labs have demonstrated adaptability across various scientific disciplines, including chemistry, physics, biology, engineering, and medicine; (3) five research trajectories focus on virtual labs, science education, and computer-based learning; and (4) eight research topics, such as comparisons with physical labs and student performance, have gained prominence. These findings had implications for educational practices, research methodologies, and policy considerations. For educational practices, virtual laboratories offer benefits by removing the need for physical resources, providing flexible delivery, enabling safe exploration, fostering engagement through hands-on experimentation, and enhancing understanding with immersive experiences. For research, virtual labs improve learning and analytical skills, generate detailed data on student behaviors and learning patterns, and lead to innovations in teaching methods and curriculum design. For policymakers, strategic planning is needed to create supportive policies for the effective adoption of virtual labs, including teacher training, infrastructure development, and curriculum integration, making science education more accessible and equitable for all students. Keywords: bibliometrics analysis, science education, research trends, virtual laboratory