Abstract
The development of web-based online laboratory for engineering education has made big progress in recent years with state-of-the-art technologies. In order to further promote the effectiveness within an online virtual environment, the virtual reality (VR) interactive feature of WebVR Control laboratory based on HTML5 is presented in this paper. The educational objective is to assist the students or researchers to conduct a realistic and immersive experiment of control engineering with a head-mounted display (HMD) equipped. The implementation of the VR technique mainly relies on the Three.js graphic engine based on Web Graphics Library (WebGL) which has been supported by most of the mainstream web browsers in their latest version without a plugin embedded. At the end of the paper, the ball and beam system is taken as an example to illustrate the whole operational approach of the novel VR experiment in detail. While such a VR interactive feature hasn’t been integrated into some of the current web-based online laboratories, the technical solution could be inspirational for them.
Highlights
In recent years, online laboratory is widely proposed and recognized as a significant technology to support life-long education and students’ autonomous learning activities along with a flexible schedule
In the realm of control engineering education, taking the fundamental objectives of engineering instructional laboratories summarized in [25] into consideration, the virtual reality (VR) interactive feature would provide an access of conducting experiment which cannot be done in the real world due to various kinds of factors, and help to reinforce the comprehending capacity of abstract control theory
As some of the plug-ins such as Java Applets are being progressively unsupported by most web browsers, new JavaScript standards (HTML5, Web Graphics Library (WebGL), etc.) already provide rich interactive feature [12], and the current trend is moving to JavaScript
Summary
Online laboratory is widely proposed and recognized as a significant technology to support life-long education and students’ autonomous learning activities along with a flexible schedule. In the realm of control engineering education, taking the fundamental objectives of engineering instructional laboratories summarized in [25] into consideration, the VR interactive feature would provide an access of conducting experiment which cannot be done in the real world due to various kinds of factors, and help to reinforce the comprehending capacity of abstract control theory. It contributes to meet the objectives of Instrumentation, Models, and Experiment.
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