Papers for

science museum exhibit designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

System turns experiment videos into interactive virtual labs

Lab2Sim: Turning Real-World Experiment Videos into Interactive Virtual Experiments

Abstract: Science experiment videos demonstrate how experiments are performed, but offer no direct interaction for learners. Turning them into virtual experiments requires not only reproducing the observed apparatus and state changes, but also enforcing the preconditions governing each operation. We introduce Lab2Sim, a benchmark of 218 science experiment videos with evidence-grounded specifications and 11,881 rubric items. To address this task, we propose EduVideo2Code, which extracts experimental procedures hierarchically, encodes them as explicit state machines to guide code generation, and refines the resulting pages through execution-based verification. Experiments show that existing multimodal models readily generate runnable pages but struggle to faithfully reconstruct experimental apparatus. EduVideo2Code consistently improves all four evaluation dimensions across two backbone models, with apparatus fidelity gains of 24.15 points.

Mon 2 NovMultimedia
The gist
Watching science experiment videos shows you what happens, but you can't interact or try it yourself. The authors created Lab2Sim, a set of experiment videos with detailed instructions to help build virtual versions you can interact with. They also developed EduVideo2Code, a tool that breaks down video steps and turns them into interactive web pages you can run and test. Their tool improved the accuracy of reproducing the experiment setups compared to existing methods.
Open → 2611.02928v1