Using WebGL to implement a glass lens in Online Labs

Abstract

Online Labs are revolutionizing education by offering access to content anytime and from any place. The OLabs project has had a deep impact on learning capabilities of students by providing an integrated environment that includes videos, animations, simulations and textual content. It has also helped to substitute teachers wherever there have been gaps. OLabs offers an excellent platform for the improvement of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) education which has been the focus of several countries in recent times. The current content in OLabs is 2 dimensional. 2D content comes with its own limitations of low accuracy and low realism and hence moving to browser based 3D representations is important to offer an enriching experience to the learner. WebGL offers the powerful capability of rendering 2D as well as 3D content in any browser without the need to install additional applications or components. With the advent of WebGL, writing 3D applications have become simpler since most details are abstracted from the programmer. New features are added almost every week in WebGL by the community making it rich and powerful. In this paper we present our work on implementing, in 3D, a convex lens experiment in OLabs Physics using WebGL and dynamic cube mapping. We propose to extend this work to more experiments in Physics and Chemistry, demonstrate it to students and measure their learning.