Mitchell Hall, Room 395 69 Union Street West Queen's University Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
+1 613-533-2995
ingenuity.labs@queensu.ca

Virtual Reality Plant for Chemical Process Design

Man with a VR headset on moving his hands

Virtual Reality (VR) has the ability to immerse users in a simulated environment and provide them with experiential learning opportunities. Most undergraduate Chemical Engineering students are required to design a chemical plant for their capstone design project without ever having visited or interacted with a full-scale processing plant. This project will design and develop an interactive VR chemical processing plant; which will be used as an educational tool for chemical engineers completing their capstone design project at Queen’s University. The goals of the project include evaluating the effects of VR on student comprehension, retention, and chemical processing design competency. The VR educational tool will give students the ability to view and interact with the unit operations inside a chemical processing plant without special training, expensive protective equipment and security clearance. Students will complete a number of challenges in VR and will be evaluated on their comprehension and invited to provide feedback on the effectiveness of the VR tool. Two versions of VR application will be developed. Eye-tracking capabilities will be incorporated into the first version to track student interaction with the VR environment and asses their level of expertise. The subsequent version will utilize the eye tracking and other data sources to develop a neural net which can determine the students level of expertise and progress in real time. An artificially intelligent assistant will be developed to help guide students in the second iteration of the VR tool. The impact of VR and the artificially intelligent assistant on student learning will be evaluated

Investigators

Paul Hungler (PI)