Design of Remote 3D Virtual Laboratory for Education On Control System Experimentation

This work develops a novel educational 3D remote laboratory which allows large scale users to learn math modeling, and put their own algorithms into practice by controlling plenty of virtual test rigs. The proposed 3D-NCSLab aims at giving users a very vivid virtual presentation of real devices and a much more flexible way to have their experiment done at anytime, no matter where they are as long as they can connect to the internet. Twelve different test rigs are set into four 3D virtual laboratories according to their categories. Indoor roaming animation as a new progressive area of virtual reality technology is used in 3D-NCSLab to provide immersive feeling where users can roam in the 3D virtual labs in first-person perspective, and users can also use mouse and keyboard to change the perspective in order to achieve multi-observation. Flash technology, 3D modeling and the software architecture of 3D-NCSLab are discussed in details. A experiment example is given to illustrate the effectiveness and convenience of 3D-NCSLab. Interesting ideas for future work along this way of research are also outlined at last.