Real-time animation of equipment in a remote laboratory

Many remote laboratory setups include a webcam for users to observe the equipment in action. However, naïve users do not get a clear picture of what might be happening inside the equipment. This paper presents one attempt made to address this issue, using an animation to provide an exploded view of the equipment and to drive this animation with data streamed in real-time from the equipment. This is achieved with no change to the existing MIT iLabs Shared Architecture; an additional data path is utilized which does not affect existing software architectures.