Digital Twinning remote laboratories for online practical learning

ABSTRACT

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 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 is presented, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality learning
• digital twin
• remote learning

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and Bloc Digital under Grant agreements no. 11936 and 11251.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Innovate UK [11251,11936].