Development of VR Teaching System for Engine Dis-assembly

Abstract: With the worldwide ravaging of the covid-19 epidemic, the traditional face-to-face education systems have been interrupted frequently. It is demanded to develop high-quality online education modalities. The webcasting based online classroom is one of the popular education modalities but suffers from poor teacher-student interactions and and low immersive learning experiences. This thesis aims to improve the online education quality by using the virtual reality (VR) technology. For the purpose of automobile engine education, we develop a VR based engine maintenance learning system. The system includes many teaching and learning components in VR enabled by the Unity engine. Users can immersively experience the complete engine disassembly process through the wearable VR display and interactive devices. The system is designed with an interactive layer, a control layer, and a physical data layer. Such a system architecture effectively separates the specific implementations of different domains and improves the R&D efficiency. Once new object models and process profiles are provided, the proposed system architecture requires no modification of codes for changed learning objects and processes. The efficiency and effictiveness of the proposed method are verfied by various experiments. The developed techniques can be useful for many other applications.