Virtual Optical Bench

by Martin Bellgardt, Sebastian Pape, David Gilbert, Marcel Prochnau, Georg König and Torsten W. Kuhlen

About

The Virtual Optical Bench was developed at RWTH Aachen University as a research project at the Virtual Reality Group of the Visual Computing Institute, to be used as a teaching tool in a lab course at the Chair for Technology of Optical Systems. It is published as an open source project under MIT License.

Paper

We presented the paper "Virtual Optical Bench: Teaching Spherical Lens Layout in VR with Real-Time Ray Tracing" at IEEE VR 2023. It is availabe here.

Abstract: Teaching in optical systems design is usually performed on an optical bench. While experimentation plays an important role in education, experiments involving expensive or dangerous components are usually limited to short, heavily supervised sessions. Computer simulations, on the other hand, offer high accessibility, but suffer from reduced realism and tangibility when presented on a 2D screen. For this reason, we present the virtual optical bench, an application that lets users explore spherical lens layouts in virtual reality (VR). We implemented a numerically accurate simulation of optical systems using Nvidia OptiX, as well as a prototypical VR application, which we then evaluated in an expert review with 6 optics experts. Based on their feedback, we re-implemented our VR application in Unreal Engine 4. The re-implementation has since been actively used for teaching optical layouts, where we performed a qualitative evaluation with 18 students. We show that our virtual optical bench achieves good usability and is perceived to enhance the understanding of course contents. 

  @INPROCEEDINGS{10108451,
    author={Bellgardt, Martin and Pape, Sebastian and Gilbert, David and Prochnau, Marcel and König, Georg and Kuhlen, Torsten W.},
    booktitle={2023 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)}, 
    title={Virtual Optical Bench: Teaching Spherical Lens Layout in VR with Real-Time Ray Tracing}, 
    year={2023},
    volume={},
    number={},
    pages={503-508},
    doi={10.1109/VR55154.2023.00065}
  }

Download Binary Release for Windows

This release was developed for HTC Vive. For other headsets, the control scheme might need to be adjusted. Note that this is research software, so it is provided without support. Use at your own risk.

Download

Repository

Find the project for Unreal Engine 4.23 in our GitLab. Our OptiX plugin is included as a submodule. If you are only interested in the plugin, you can find it here.

Video