Super Reality for Hands-on Online Education

The outbreak of Covid-19 has affected educational systems worldwide. By the end of May 2020, there were 1,190,287,189 students affected worldwide because of school closures, which accounts for 68% of all enrolled students. Among all affected students, the greatest challenge is posed to those in science and engineering majors requiring doing hands-on experiments and projects. They no longer have access to their laboratories and experiments that are reliant on individual being present in a laboratory have been completely shut down. Remote teaching cannot fulfill the requirements for laboratory experiments. In order to meet the challenge, the researchers in the University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong and University of Glasgow propose to develop super reality, including haptic, audio, visual, temperature, and virtual reality, enabled on-line laboratories by utilizing telerobotics, smart data glove, virtual reality, and 5G communication, and integrate them into social networking services, to create an on-line community for cooperative hands-on teaching and learning. As a result, students at different locations will be able to work together as a team to learn subjects such as science, nano manufacturing and microelectronics by hands-on experimental studies. Furthermore, learning of science and engineering in the areas such as nanotechnology and microelectronics, particularly in the atomic or molecular level, may be greatly enhanced by allowing students to interact directly with objects in the domain, such as atoms and molecules. The remote instrumentation technologies integrated with super reality interfaces can enable the students to have access to expensive instruments and lead them towards deeper understanding of nano world. In addition, the proposed technologies will also enable students from various geographic and cultural settings to work or learn as a team. This will create a unique cooperative and culturally diverse working and learning environment regardless of limitations of places and local access. As a result, the impact of the infectious diseases such COVID-19 on education can be significantly mitigated.