An Immersive Visualization Tool for Teaching and Simulation of Smart Grid Technologies
This tool addresses the need for effective education and simulation in smart grid research for communities, industry, and higher education, though it is incremental as it applies existing visualization methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of teaching and simulating smart grid technologies by developing an immersive visualization tool that uses large-scale centers like planetariums to allow multiple users to interact in real-time with virtual smart grid scenarios, facilitating community education and serving as a research tool for testing algorithms and strategies.
Intelligent power grid research, i.e. smart grid, involves many simultaneous users spread over a relatively large geographical area. A tool for advancing research and community education is presented utilizing large-scale visualization centers, e.g. planetariums, in simulating smart grid interactions. This approach immerses the user in virtual smart grid visualization and allows the user, with several other users, to interact in real time. This facilitates community education by demonstrating how the power grid functions with smart technologies. The simulation is sophisticated enough to also be used as a research tool for industry and higher education to test software algorithms, deployment strategies, communications protocols, and even new hardware.