Bridging Real and Virtual Reality in a Complex Learning Environment

The aim of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility and the advantages of a new kind of learning environment for vocational training in production engineering. Based on the combination of real world phenomena and virtual world simulations through a Graspable User Interface it will be possible to freely change between operations on real physical objects and their virtual counterparts. These Twin-Objects, real and corresponding virtual components, will compose a new kind of complex construction kit which opens a new era of simulation technology: Real and Virtual Reality. An era in which real physical parts have an adequate functional, structural and behavioural description, to build from these components a composite system which again shows the correspondence between the physical and the virtual system. The new learning environment allows the composition of a real system and the concrete demonstration of its behaviour by human hand operations (sensed by a scanning device), synchronously generating the control software which assures this behaviour.