Improving virtual learning environments by development and integration of 3D models of real devices

When it comes to education we usually imagine a traditional one, which in most cases is conducted by lectors or educators who present the learning materials face to face with their students. With the technological progress during the last years, the things have changed - new ways for learning and teaching were born. In the present days we refer to these approaches as digital education or simply e-learning. The modern educational processes include some features of the traditional ones, but they also implement new technologies for visualization of contents and for providing connectivity and access to various resources. One of the most recent and attractive ways for providing e-learning courses is through the use of virtual laboratories. In the last years many different virtual laboratories were developed and presented including our own virtual laboratory in Telecommunication networks and systems. The purpose of this laboratory is to provide means for interaction and experiments with real communication devices, which are remotely accessed. Based on our experience and the feedback from our students about the laboratory, we have come to the conclusion that one of the drawbacks of our solution is the lack of physical interaction with the telecommunication devices. This means that the users of the virtual laboratory can take advantage of the functionality of the remotely accessed devices and they can learn how to operate them, but they do not know how the devices look like or what physical characteristics they have. We believe that obtaining knowledge about the physical structure and the hardware architecture of every system is an essential part of the educational process. In order to provide such knowledge an investigation of the modern options for providing additional visual resources and the ways to integrate this content in the virtual laboratories is required. In this paper we present an approach for visualization of the communication devices in our virtual laboratory, but the same approach can be used for visualization of different objects in every virtual learning environment. Our approach uses the most attractive and provocative way for getting realistic information about the physical structure and the architecture of the devices - the use of 3D models. In the paper we investigate the trends in the area of the 3D modelling of different objects and we provide a solution for integration of 3D content in virtual learning environments.