Shifting Virtual Reality Education to the Next Level – Experiencing Remote Laboratories Through Mixed Reality

Technical universities are more and more focusing on engineering education as a primary discipline. All along with the integration of various innovative fields of application into the curriculum of prospective engineers the need for appropriate educational features into the studies also increases. Unlike exclusively theoretical studies as physics, mathematics or information sciences the education of engineers extensively relies on the integration of practical use-cases into the education process. However, not every university is able to provide technical demonstrators or laboratories for all of the various applications in the field of engineering. Thus, it is the aim of the current paper to propose a method that enables visiting a high variety of engineering laboratories based on Virtual Reality. A Virtual Reality simulator is used to create and emulate remote laboratories that can be located at arbitrary places far away from their Virtual Reality representation. This way, by melting real world demonstrators with virtual environments, we enable a physically and technically accurate simulation of various engineering applications. The proof of concept is performed by the implementation and testing of a laboratory experiment that consists of two six-axis robots performing collaborative tasks.