Leveraging Mixed Reality for Augmented Structural Mechanics Education

Abstract The field of structural mechanics deals with the behavior of bodies under loads, and a considerable portion of structural mechanics education involves the introduction of theoretical models to describe the behavior of real-world structural elements. However, the gap between abstract theoretical descriptions of the behavior in the classroom versus the experience and perception of the deformation can be an obstacle to structural mechanics education and learning. This paper presents preliminary results of the use of mixed reality technology to bridge this gap by enabling real-time simulation of structural elements and effective and immersive visualization of their structural response. To that end, this paper introduces a server-client architecture, where user-defined loading is applied to a finite element model of the structure on a computational server, and the computed response is superimposed and visualized in the physical environment. The results can be interactively examined from different viewpoints and the desired level of detail by the engineer under training. The proposed framework was used to create a series of visualization modules for a series of beams and a more complex bridge structure under flexure, torsion, tension, and compression and the system was deployed in the form of a mobile augmented reality application accessible through smartphones for broad accessibility. Markerless tracking was used to increase the flexibility and ease-of-use of the application and color contours and colorbar displays were overlaid to improve students' understanding of the deformation and strain results. Preliminary results of the implementation showed its promise as a flexible, interactive, and efficient learning tool. Future work should focus on the evaluation of the application to assess its effectiveness in improving structural mechanics education as well as to identify its potential limitations.