Research On The Virtual Laboratory In Distance Education

With the development of the times, distance education has been turning into important complement of the traditional teaching gradually. The development of distance education has experienced three stages: the broadcast teaching ^ television teaching and network teaching. Compared with traditional teaching, network teaching has interactivity and performs plentifully, making full use of the advanced teaching means, such as images ^ sound and animation. It represents the direction of the future remote education development. A large number of courses, especially engineering courses usually require that students do a lot of experiments to develop their ability of operation and observation. So how to help students do experiments on network and build up a virtual laboratory on it is becoming an important subject.This article, first of all, proposes the structural model of the virtual laboratory based on WWW, and analyzes the characteristics of the virtual laboratory, the major functions of it, and some critical techniques. It also classifies the virtual laboratory, introduces the characteristics of the virtual experiments, and puts forward a couple of key problems about how to perform virtual laboratory, including the design of virtual instrument, the operation of virtual experiments and the demonstration of experiment.Then, the article analyzes the characteristics of Java, Flash and VRML, the tools of designing virtual experiments, pointing out the reasons why they are suitable for designing virtual experiments, and also compares the advantages and disadvantages respectively. In order to enhance the reality of virtual experiments, the author emphasizes how to apply virtual reality to the virtual experiments.In Chapter Four, this article reviews the history of virtual reality, analyzes the characteristics of the virtual reality and also introduces the hardware equipments of virtual reality and the plan of realization. However, the prices of these equipments are so expensive that any individual and group can't afford them.This restricts the application of virtual experiments. To approach this problem, the article advocates a strategy that a virtual laboratory is build up based on software program creation. By this means, the men can get away from counting on expensive equipments, appreciate the experiment process at PC, and even carry out the experiments .the main tool is VRML. The article analyzes the VRML language characteristics, and points out the reason why VRML is suitable for designing virtual experiments.In the subsequent section, the article discusses in detail some key techniques to carry out virtual experiments by means of VRML, for instance, the modeling of virtual equipments, the main methods of conforming animation by using VRML, and how to realize interactivity in virtual experiments. The main modeling methods of virtual equipments in virtual experiments include: geometrical modeling, physical modeling and behavioral modeling. Behavioral modeling is the key to obtain the acquisition of this third dimension. Then, this article analyzes the process of VRML animation, classifies the animation in VRML, which is interpolator animation, viewpoint animation and frame animation, discussing the principles and methods respectively. Then, the article discusses in detail how to realize interactivity in virtual experiments by means of VRML, points out that to realize the simple interactivity can make use of the sensor nodes. And the men can get the complicated function by cooperating with Java Script nodes and EAI.In conclusion, the paper puts forward that to build up virtual laboratory in distance education is not only necessary but also feasible. What's more it discusses how to introduce virtual reality techniques into virtual laboratory and use VRML to design virtual experiments, etc. Finally, the author summarizes all the major points of the thesis, and points out the direction of research.