Universal Virtual Laboratory (UVL)

Temple University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal # HRD-0004292 Institution: Temple University Principal Investigator: Bruce Butz Title: "Universal Virtual Laboratory" ABSTRACT The focus of the Universal Virtual Laboratory (UVL) project is finding new ways to accommodate people with severe motor impairments to an electrical engineering laboratory. Any participants who are deaf or hard-of-hearing will also be accommodated. The major goals of the project are to: 1) Develop a simulated, but realistic, laboratory that will enable students to name, place and interconnect various circuit elements, electronic devices, electrical systems, signal generators and measuring instruments. 2) Enable users to manipulate virtual instruments, elements and devices either by direct manipulation, with a mouse or a headpointer, or by discrete actions with switches, keyboard, or speech recognition. The system will maximize the speed with which the student can interact with the system by using rule-based algorithms. 3) Develop novel input/output devices that will accommodate various disabled students. 4) Permit the student to connect in any physically feasible way the elements, instruments available in a typical laboratory storeroom, and obtain the same responses, including failures, that would be experienced in the laboratory. 5) Simulate the performance of the interconnected elements and objects by integrating them seamlessly with software application packages. These packages will produce a data stream representing current, voltages, frequencies, power, etc. The data stream will be used as inputs to the various simulated measuring instruments. 6) Provide the student with an intelligent laboratory assistant that will answer the student's questions in a way that simulates the role of an expert laboratory assistant who is expert in both the subject matter and accommodation of disabilities. 7) Place the resultant UVL modules on CD ROMS and make these modules completely functional on the World Wide Web. 8) Disseminate the results over the World Wide Web, in appropriate journals and through presentation at notable conferences. The framework developed in this project could be used as a template for the design and implementation of realistic virtual laboratories in other engineering courses as well as in the physical sciences.