A new 3d model to define laboratory services

In the last two decades, remote and virtual laboratories have seen an ever-growing acceptance in universities, and this fact has supported a wider adoption of a lab-based education framework, especially in engineering. The reason lies on new possibilities to develop learning by doing educational paths, as laboratories allow to achieve important pedagogical objectives. The related research field has two main communities. The former is working on evolution of educational scenarios. The latter deals with technical development of laboratories, and it actually influences the former community’s work. Despite the huge amount of works, specific aspects are often discussed singularly, to the detriment of a holistic vision. The present paper wants to approach this issue towards a technical-development perspective. We propose a classification of laboratories, which firstly aims at a common taxonomy to identify their typologies. In our opinion, such a classification helps the research community by allowing to compare different solutions available and, more important, it provides each laboratory implementation with specific technology resources possible to implement and constraints to be faced. This eventually develops into the networks of laboratories characterisation. Although previous works have been already proposed, the technical solutions they refer to have seen great progresses in recent years, thus we start from these useful work to combine their results and propose a new classification of laboratories, by means of a 3D visualisation designed as black-box model combination.