EngineeringXR
EngineeringXR Research Group
This research group explores the use of Extended Reality (XR) technology as an education tool in engineering classroom and laboratory environments to enhance the student experience and enhance the instructional content delivery, across a diverse level of educational programmes.
Dr. David McDonnell (Head of Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering)
Dr. Kevin Delaney (Head of Mechanical Engineering)
Efficacy and Improvements using XR
This research group investigates the best of use of Extended Reality technology to provide enhanced learning and activity potential with engineering classroom and laboratory environments.
These enhancements can include:
- improved instructional delivery, to describe experimental actions with more contextual information
- improved instructional design, to communicate experimental actions in a more appropriate way
- improved laboratory management (for the laboratory facilitator), providing more student contact time to the facilitator
- delivery of laboratory activities which were previously impossible or too costly
These enhancements are deployed by creating bespoke XR interventions using appropriate development platforms.
Whilst requiring significant technical expertise, the choice of developing bespoke interventions over investing in existing ‘off-the-shelf’ applications provides significant advantages:
- allowing interventions to be tailored specifically the lecturer-driven activities
- reducing development costs which would be unsustainable if outsourced externally to third-party developers
Laboratory Environments
Within the School of Mechanical Engineering, we have developed laboratory content for student use in three engineering laboratory spaces:
- BST206 Conditional Based Monitoring lab
- BST107 Fluid Power lab
- BST295 Festo Lab
These laboratory spaces are used constantly by students within the School, and our aim is to populate all of these laboratory spaces with complete, up-to-date XR experiences to complement the physical activities currently carried out within.
Hardware Use
The group uses a combination of AR headsets (currently HoloLens 2 and XReal Air2 Ultra), and VR/XR headsets (Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S) to facilitate our XR projects.
As appropriate new hardware devices come to market, we endeavour to investigate these devices on a small scale before proposing to invest in large batches to deploy in our laboratory environments.
We fully expect to continue to use hardware past their expected technical lifespan, to maximise usage and output.
Conditional Based Monitoring using AR
A collection of AR-enhanced experiments was developed within this project, based around Conditional Based Monitoring experiments:
- Creating and Measuring Imbalance
- Vibration Analysis
- Shaft Alignment using Dial Gauges
- Shaft Alignment using Laser Equipment
AR-enhanced experimental instructional content is delivered using HoloLens 2 headsets.
Pumping Rig VR/XR
In previous iterations of the original physical experimental environment, students would need to share time on the rig, due to practical time constraints, and this would have diminished the student experience.
This project implements a virtual equivalent of a pumping training rig, used in Fluid Power experiments.
The rationale for the development of this project is to offer students the opportunity to fully engage with the experimental equipment in a virtual environment, allowing each student time to actively interact with experimental process.
Development work for this project is on-going.
Instructional Content Display in XR
In the initial AR projects developed within the School, an ‘off-the-shelf’ licensed commercial product was used to create and develop instructional content.
Whilst this was a very appropriate workflow at the time, and whilst it did allow us to rollout AR enhanced content, some distinct drawbacks were identified; most notably a lack of flexibility in instructional communication (audio and visual limitations) and a lack of multi-user interactivity.
The project seeks to create a bespoke framework of XR instructional display, which can be driven, at the outset, by data provided by the lecturers involved in the experimental design (who are not XR developers).
This collaboration between physical experimental designer and XR designer will build valuable sense of ownership and collaboration. It also seeks to engage more lecturing staff into the XR intervention development process by giving them the opportunity to drive the underlying instructional dataset, and simply allow the XR designers to ‘translate’ that dataset into an XR deliverable.
MetrologyXR*
Metrology is a significant engineering process which intersects activities many engineering programmes, from apprenticeship upwards. Significant quantities of students in the School of Mechanical Engineering participate in metrology-based experiments.
The future* project proposes the development of multiple XR interventions, to provide an off-site (outside of laboratory) training platform, preparing students in advance of physical interaction.
The benefits of this project include:
- significant operational Health and Safety elements
- operational freedom of activity outside of the laboratory environment; students can essentially operate within a complete virtual laboratory using just one XR headset