Transforming Engineering Education with Virtual Reality Labs

1. Transforming Engineering Education with Virtual Reality Labs: The Role of iXR Labs namaste@ixrlabs.com www.ixrlabs.com

2. Virtual reality (VR) technology and engineering education are a marriage made in heaven. VR is an amazing method of presenting difficult-to-understand concepts to students in a form that traditional classrooms just can’t compete with. VR takes these advanced and abstract concepts and presents them in a visualized and interactive format that students can manipulate to better learn. Additionally, we are witnesses to an advent of institutions leveraging VR to take labs fully online. This article by our course developers, ixrlabs, goes into detail about the possibilities for VR labs in engineering education that they have developed in stunning detail. A great number of the experiments and labs they have created are definitely available for other institutions. Ixlabs has an AOL (anytime/anywhere) engineering lab that rose in popularity as a result of COVID like our technologies that you can view on Inside Higher Ed. Understanding Virtual Reality Labs Virtual reality (VR) labs are an amazing invention of the 21st century, as they apply VR technology to a simulated classroom learning experience. In VR labs, students put on their headsets and dive into an interactive environment that empowers them to practice engaging with the challenging concepts in their engineering curriculum in 3D. Do you want to view a complex system inside of a jet engine? How about a walkway bridge? Do you want to paint on a piece of canvas in 3D? How about walking all the way around a 3D model of the pyramids at Giza? By enabling students to view full 3D models and fully 3D systems, virtual reality labs empower today's learners with the ability to fully iterate and evolve their designs. VR labs allow students from all over the world to connect and dive into the same virtual environment together. In this simulated educational environment, hosted in your living room or a quiet place on campus, you and your study partners can engage with simulated designs that are as close to the real thing as they're going to be until you finish your program and join the real-world industry. By enabling technology-driven college students to engage and interact with subject matter, VR labs have helped lead an integral part of the weekend and after-hours campus life. The Impact of VR in Education Virtual Reality (VR) technology did not stop with gaming: its use has spilled over into the education sector, providing a new, immersive way to engage with learners. The technology creates an artificial environment that can help students link the real world with theoretical concepts or visualize how complex 2D concepts work in 3D. This makes sense of abstract theories in vast topic areas such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Many academic courses utilizing VR to teach antagonistic classes have found their pass rate to increase from as little as 50% to major heights of 95%. Some students are even using VR to teach or lay the foundations for becoming a surgeon. Platforms such as ENGAGE are used in engineering to make online study possible or provide a collaborative learning space. Other platforms such as Osso VR are used in the medical profession to validate medical students who wish to enter into orthopedic surgery. namaste@ixrlabs.com www.ixrlabs.com

3. iIXR Labs and Their Contribution ixrlabs is a leading education technology company shaping the way engineering should be taught and learned. It bridges the huge gulf between learning engineering principles and the engineering done to meet the challenges of the real world with innovative solutions. The goal is to prevent students from not merely getting passing grades but to also become engineers. These are software products designed based on extensive experience in successful product design and expertise in a wide range of engineering fields, coupled with an equally large amount of experience in academia. This suite of virtual products (computer and Internet delivered) is unique to engineering education, and comparable products just don't exist. Here are the benefits of using the virtual products: These virtual products are beautifully and very realistically rendered simulations of various structures and mechanisms. The students can "play" with these by making a change to a design, and then they can—safely—watch what happens when they crash their new car design into a dashboard, or when they want to know what the stress will be in a hip joint implant when the patient rolls over on the operating table, or whether the lights will come on in the Boeing 747 after landing due to a design change in the wiring. The list goes on. The most difficult element in an online delivery format is how do you teach students to get their hands "dirty" tinkering with these things. Now you can. The value of the computer technology is that you have essentially failed early and often, and of course, the earlier the better, and virtually, with the lesson taking place out of the "flight path" to your head. The result is a great success— graduation! The Future of Engineering Education with VR Forces driving the adoption of VR in engineering education largely relate to the technology and need. Over the last several years, efforts to produce systems that enable educational institutions to add VR to lab-based programs are materializing in the market with high seats-of-use costs. The costs of these systems could involve evolution at room scale or otherwise-specific costs. EVR, Early Childhood Development's (ECD's) VR program elements, and basic clinical room-scale-type systems, can extend the cost of a single-use student to high four-to-low-five-figure student costs— depending on the brand of VR. Other options. The expected ways of dealing with creating change in schools involve grants. Receiving grant funding for program and lab development is a maintenance cost-based and a potentially difficult path. Alternatives with a longer-term approach include approaching the problem very much as the internet did in K–12, setting up computer labs complete with commodore 64's, grids, and printer labs like an IT model. This brand's current main project is as a channel initiative with the state of TN and others in the lower 48. The project's overall plan includes a structure for each charitable foundation—an arrangement with TN's IT department and related associations. Project development partnership phases requiring ramp-up dollars include: Phase one, 2022: 1–3 architectural firms contracted for library construction templates Design firm to create Club 35 training materials Documents to include club 35 (TM'd) clubs elements Kingsport, TN- namaste@ixrlabs.com www.ixrlabs.com

4. based headquarters: attached lab facility build-out: $2–4 million build-out completion costs US sales, installations, architecture, customer service Phase two, 2023: Adding pending hardware design elements to the Lenovo-based network The Soviet model: current US events passing a budget provides 20/EU pilots for high schools on a 70 school base—ratified in 2022. Funding provided by Microsoft. Pennington, Virginia: initial manufacturing facilities—four, 4- five-bay-based facilities on standby, ready-for-build costs—paid independently by owners. MS reduced list costs based on a listing TEN D# plan Phase three, 2024: Club 35 added to 35 countries: added to countries representing 90% of the world's population Tuning into state-based SysOp managers: using COE- based nominations for state-based state universities for tech lists MS owners, ECD, and related associations; initial recommendation for working with TEN D. provided by Gartner Group, Northern Hemisphere Phase four, 2025: April 2025+: continued expansion on a case-by-case basis. These days, many engineering students have the chance to set foot into a fully immersive, hands-on laboratory that they may not have been able to in the past thanks to virtual reality (VR) labs. Traditional labs are replaced with simulations that allow students to immerse themselves into the environment that the professor has developed. This allows students to see the tiny, intricate designs of complex labs and better understand the material because they have seen the visualization of that part of an engineering process. This basically allows students to undo the financial and safety constraints of the real world and innovate through mistakes and trial/error. This is an incredible way for students to see different projects, and the best way for them to learn about the modern working culture and learn along with all the technological advancements that the world is seeing every day. Our software platform creates an environment where all of your students can engage with one another and complete classwork in the real world. You have the opportunity to design and construct the best way for students to learn and can have the opportunity to make real-time corrections on the fly. Everyone should take a breath and think of the complexity and difficulty that this would invite. On the inside, ixrlabs figured all of those complex curricula out for you, and we found that to be difficult. We developed the best ways that professors and students can learn more effectively, and that’s by: Active versus passive student experience in the classroom Peer-to-peer collaborative methods that students value more than the teacher-student relationship and classroom reductionism View on learning and instruction through student-centered instruction guidelines These three important methods were the best ways that we found that we can improve the student success rate by a significant amount and raise the satisfaction rate in universities that you really bump into right away. We felt as though higher learning instruction and preparation for the business industry’s first day of work have not changed for the past 100 years. So, we wanted to change that. PHONE: 7425060606 EMAIL: namaste@ixrlabs.com ADDRESS: JMD MEGAPOLIS, 1140 - 41, 11th Floor, Badshahpur Sohna Rd Hwy, Sector 48, Gurugram, Haryana namaste@ixrlabs.com www.ixrlabs.com