Infrastructure of web-based VR-form virtual laboratory

With the recent technological advancing, E-learning has been enabled to operate via the World Wide Web (WWW). Being an important education method, online virtual experiment system is also greatly developed in these years. It has been used to aid the education in some areas, for example, control engineering, physics phenomenon comprehension. For the sake of aiding the education of undergraduate's engineering experiment curriculum we have developed an infrastructure of Web-based VR-form Virtual Laboratory (WBVL). Using this infrastructure, we have successfully implemented several virtual engineering chemical and mechanical experiments. With its four important features, three-dimension, interactivity, web basing and virtuality, WBVL can make its users feel as if they are performing a real-world experiment. VRML is used to build the virtual 3D scene, and Script node, EAI and SDK are used to extend the VRML's interactive and computational ability. Using client/server model, WBVL has well-defined system architecture. The set-up of WBVL is composed of user's guide, laboratory experiment, online help and experiment report. Combined model is the mostly used virtual experiment operation model of WBVL.