Digital Twinning Remote Laboratories for Online Practical Learning
This addresses the need for accessible remote learning tools for educators and students, but it is incremental as it builds on existing virtual reality and digital twinning concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of time-consuming and costly development of virtual learning tools by proposing a system for semi-automatic creation of digital twins, enabling lecturers to generate their own content for practical lab tutorials, with a case study applied to an electrical laboratory.
The COVID19 pandemic has demonstrated a need for remote learning and virtual learning applications such as virtual reality (VR) and tablet-based solutions. Creating complex learning scenarios by developers is highly time-consuming and can take over a year. It is also costly to employ teams of system analysts, developers and 3D artists. There is a requirement to provide a simple method to enable lecturers to create their own content for their laboratory tutorials. Research has been undertaken into developing generic models to enable the semi-automatic creation of a virtual learning tools for subjects that require practical interactions with the lab resources. In addition to the system for creating digital twins, a case study describing the creation of a virtual learning application for an electrical laboratory tutorial has been presented.