A development platform prototype for virtual laboratories

Virtual laboratories provide a cost‐efficient way for schools and universities to organize high‐quality laboratory work in engineering disciplines. However, developing virtual labs is time‐consuming and often comes with duplicated efforts in developing common features. This paper presents a development platform prototype for virtual laboratories (DPVL). It consists of multiple modules to meet the needs of developing virtual labs. Details of the platform module design and its implementation are explained. Finally, the case study about the development of a virtual gearbox lab demonstrates the functionality of DPVL and the process of applying it for corresponding development. To evaluate the performance of DPVL, a comparative study has been conducted by involving different developers to develop the same virtual lab with and without the support of DPVL. The results proved that the VL development effort can be greatly reduced by more than 60% both in development time consumed and the code size generated. Moreover, DPVL is further tested for its hardware compatibility by students who developed VL for different display hardware. However, the final user evaluation experiment conducted has verified that DPVL is well received by users in terms of its ease of development, user‐friendliness, and usefulness.