EXTENDABLE - network of EXTENDed reAlity-enaBLEd laboratories for remote practical training

Practical exercises are an important and fundamental aspect of STEM discipline training. Accessing laboratories and performing activities that confirm, reinforce and enrich the knowledge acquired during theoretical lectures therefore turns out to be an indispensable moment in teaching at all levels from primary schools to universities. Allowing these activities to be conducted even in conditions of overcrowded classrooms or, as has happened recently, in cases of movement restrictions due to pandemic is a goal that has found interest from all governments and educational oversight bodies.
To address these needs, the Research Team involving Units from University of Naples Federico II, Sannio and Calabria is proposing the creation of a network of laboratories which will enable the remote execution of specific laboratory activities through the use of extended reality. It will thus be possible for the student (but the same principle can also be applied to the world of work and industrial training) to conduct laboratory activities directly from his or her home and at any time of the day (once the confirmation of free time slot has been received). Indeed, altought in extended reality, the experiment will be executed by using real devices, as a consequence, the specific experiment can be executed only by a student or a working group. To this aim, several elements need to be defined, designed and implemented for the correct and effective operation of the network. The first objective is to define methodologies for scanning, reconstruction and functionalization of instruments and devices actually present in the laboratory. In virtual reality applications, augmented or extended, immersiveness is a key component and a faithful reconstruction of the adopted objects as well as their operation is a key aspect. Alongside this is the need to ensure a speed and responsiveness of interaction as similar as possible to what the student would experience in the real laboratory; appropriate communication interfaces must therefore be defined along with metrics and associated measurement methods capable of evaluating and minimizing all delays due to communications between the different components of the laboratory network. Another aspect to be taken into account is the diversity and complexity of the operations that students will be called upon to perform, which will require equally extensive management of the information to be transmitted (think, for example, of an exercise involving the movement of a robotic arm or a reconfigurable device capable of emulating different measurement circuits ).
The network of laboratories will be tested on an initial prototype implementation involving mainly measuring instruments (a typical object of metrology courses), and a defined  number of experiments accessible to students of engineering courses will be set up at the different locations, which will form the basis for an initial validation of the system.