International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract—In recent years, the use of virtual laboratories has become increasingly vital in engineering education. For the effective implementation of virtual laboratories, the identification of complex student needs is essential. The adoption of Extended Reality (XR) at universities has increased significantly. Nevertheless, specific design guidelines for engineering environments with high risk like virtual battery laboratories remain scarce. This study identifies key user-centric requirements through a four-phase mixed-methods design. In the first part of our research, the theoretical foundation is established by a systematic literature review of recent publications and existing state-of-the-art overviews. In addition, a quantitative survey with 106 engineering students, which was carried out in October 2025, assessed broad student perspectives and acceptance levels. To gain in-depth insights into specific technical and pedagogical needs, we conducted qualitative interviews with five Master’s students in November 2025. The triangulation of the obtained results enables a robust validation of the identified requirements. Our findings indicate that students prioritize safety simulations (freedom to fail), real-time feedback, and industry-relevant content for virtual laboratories. Students also highlighted the value of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven tutor to support experiment implementation. We identified high hardware costs and limited institutional integration of XR as key challenges. To ensure that our results can also be used for further research projects, we present actionable design requirements for a virtual battery laboratory and provide a comprehensive roadmap for future virtual laboratories regarding engineering education.

Keywords—virtual laboratories, engineering education, student-centered learning, extended reality, batteries

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Cite: Heiko Fechtner, Nicole Klewicz, Josephine Martini, and Benedikt Schmuelling, "Defining User-centric Requirements for Virtual Laboratories: A Mixed-methods Study on XR in Engineering Education," International Journal of Information and Education Technology, vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 2327-2335, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).