2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Tangible Digital Twins: Experiencing Structural Mechanics by Inducing the Sense of Stiffness via Hand Gestures in Virtual Reality

Presented at Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) Technical Session - Instructional Technology 2

The behavior of structural elements governed by structural mechanics is often challenging to grasp in a theory-only classroom environment. This is due to the gap between abstract theoretical descriptions of structural behavior versus the experience and perception of the deformation. To bridge this gap and facilitate better comprehension of structural mechanics concepts, we develop a virtual reality (VR) application that allows users to interact with virtual objects in real time with their hands. Users can deform virtual entities using realistic hand gestures, and the sense of stiffness is evoked by using the speed of deformation as a proxy for the object’s resistance to deformation. To achieve this goal, our design requires the user to move their hands at a speed inversely proportional to the member stiffness, stopping deformation if this constraint is violated. To assess the effectiveness of these techniques, we introduce three game scenes within our study with beams under tension, compression, bending, and torsion. Preliminary results from an early pilot user study show the promise of the proposed platform in inducing a sense of stiffness. The proposed application provides a promising pathway for immersive experiential learning of engineering concepts that would otherwise require expensive laboratory experiments.

Authors

Kaiyuan Wang University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Kaiyuan Wang is an undergraduate student in the department of Statistics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Statistic and Computer Science. His reserach interests include MR technology development, software development, and computer system.
Mr. Yuxiang Zhao University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Yuxiang Zhao is a Ph.D. student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, US. He received his BS degree in Civil Engineering from Tongji University, China in 2019, and his MS degree in Civil Engineering from University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI, US in 2020. His research interests include applying deep learning and robotics in civil infrastructure inspection.
Ishfaq Aziz University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Ishfaq Aziz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA. He received his BS in Civil Engineering and MS in Civil Engineering (Structural) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). His current research focuses on radar sensing and waveform inversion for non-destructive characterization of sub-surface materials using Bayesian inference and Machine Learning techniques.
Dr. Mohamad Alipour http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2018-134X University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Mohamad Alipour is a research assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. His research interests are in digital twins, digitization, robotic inspections, and infrastructure data analytics.

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