Remote laboratories for optical metrology: from the lab to the cloud

The idea of remote laboratories is reviewed, and the potential of the approach on selected examples with special focus on the field of optical metrology is illustrated. The concept of remote metrology is extended beyond the simple exchange of data between distant laboratories and the remote access to experimental facilities embedded in modern educational concepts. We describe an architecture that provides the opportunity to communicate with and eventually control the physical setup of a remote metrology system. We show that such a concept can be implemented within cloud-computing environments, and may extend their current performance by the access to experimental facilities. SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. 1 Introduction The idea of remote optical metrology has been reported as early as 2000 with a conceptual illustration using comparative digital holography, aiming at the remote comparison of two nominally identical but physically different objects.