Remote Lab meets Virtual Reality – Enabling immersive access to high tech laboratories from afar

Virtual Reality is currently one of the strongest trends in the consumer and gaming industry, while the typical Remote Lab in engineering education uses traditional 2D visualization options for desktop PCs. In this paper those two domains were combined by establishing state-of-the-art frontends for an existing engineering education Remote Lab. As the whole nature of this approach is experimental, the authors aimed at a variable degree of immersion and established two different approaches for the creation of a virtual environment. The first approach is to display the representation of the physical laboratory with 360°-images in a Street View type fashion. The second approach is a completely reconstructed virtual 3D-model of the existing physical laboratory. Both approaches were realized with the Unity engine and tested in the concerning laboratory.