Abstract:

The transformation of the lab and practical training towards virtualized labs offers a wide range of advantages in future teaching of photonics. Study programs and courses can get offered across institutions or for off-site students. Especially the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic required an easy to adapt and integrate system to make practical lab training remotely possible. In the context of the international master of photonics course at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU), this is accomplished by the two cooperating projects digiPhoton and Lichtwerkstatt. DigiPhoton is a DAAD-funded project for the implementation and evaluation of digital learning content. The Lichtwerkstatt is a BMBF-funded project for building and establishing a photonics maker space at the FSU to facilitate innovation processes between research, industry, and open maker culture. In our paper, we like to present a prototype of XRTwinLab - an open-source framework to virtualize experimental setups and make them remotely accessible via extended reality (XR) technology.

Based on learnings from the Covid-19 pandemics and practical training courses, we worked out a requirement catalog, which led to the three main pillars of XRTwinLab. The framework should be based on existing modules easy to adapt for educational and research staff untrained in software development. To enable the distribution and implementation, the framework should be as platform-, system- and technology-independent as possible. And lastly, to facilitate the use of remote labs as close as possible to real lab work, the framework should support immersive technologies, such as virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR).

To ensure platform independence and offer access without specific devices, we concentrate the whole development based on open web technologies. On one side, the easy-to-learn programming ecosystem around the script language JavaScript (JS) allows client- and serverside programming as well as supports contemporary standards for AR and VR applications. The control and feedback of the experiment are realized via an event-based messaging system using Websockets. This allows extending and interconnecting various experiments and access by multiple clients in classroom or collaborative learning environments. If optomechanical components usually used in photonics are not motorized, we provide 3d-printable models of attachments, which allow assembling actuators and sensors which are controlled by ESP32 microcontrollers connected to a wifi network. In the long run, the current Github repository used for development is intended to be used as an open library for 3d-models and source code to integrate all kinds of hardware or measurement devices used in photonics and further research fields.

Right now, we finished a first implementation of a remotely accessible Michelson interferometer which is used as one of the experiments in the practical training during the master of photonics program. We further can show the adaptability and versability of XRTwinLab in other open-source community projects and current experiments from research at the FSU Jena.

Keywords:

Remote experiment, open source, augmented reality, virtual reality.