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 tothird-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 to populate all of these laboratory spaces with complete up-to-date XR experiences to complement the physical activities 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
- Shaft Alignment using Dial Gauges
- Shaft Alignment using Laser Equipment
Experimental instructional content is delivered in AR using HoloLens 2 headsets.
Pumping Rig VR/XR
This project proposes a virtual equivalent of a pumping training rig, used in Fluid Power experiments.
The rationale for the development of this project was to offer students the opportunity to fully engage the experimental equipment and actively interact with experimental process.
In previous iterations of the experimental environment, students would need to share time on the rig, due to practical time constraints, and this would have diminished the student experience.
The project is on-going in development.
Instructional Content Display in XR
In the initial AR projects developed in the School, an off-the-shelf licensed commercial product was used to create instructional content.
Whilst this was a very appropriate opportunity at the time, some distinct drawbacks were identified in using this product as a means rolling out an appropriate educational framework.
Most notably a lack of flexibility in instructional communication (audio and visual limitations) and a lack of multi-user
The project seeks to create a bespoke framework of XR instructional display, which can be driven at the outset by instructional data provided by the lecturers involved in the experimental design.
This collaboration between physical experimental designer and XR designer will build valuable sense of ownership of data, and seeks to engage more lecturing staff into the XR intervention development process by giving them the opportunity to drive the underlying instruction dataset, and simply allowing 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