JoWUA

Abstract

Advanced microarchitecture courses demand rich, hands-on exploration of pipelines, caches, and memory systems. Though traditional hardware labs are costly, location-bound, and difficult to scale for remote or hybrid delivery. This paper presents a cloud-hosted, multi-user virtual reality (VR) laboratory designed specifically for advanced microarchitecture education and remote teaching. The proposed platform delivers an experiment-rich environment where students collaboratively inspect, instrument, and modify microarchitectural components such as pipeline stages, cache hierarchies, and branch predictors in real time. Architecturally, the system combines a web-based cloud front-end for authentication and session management, a scalable VR services layer providing multi-user scenes and collaboration tools, and a backend to adapt microarchitecture simulators whose internal state is visualized in 3D. Pedagogically, define learning objectives around instruction-level parallelism, hazard analysis, and memory hierarchy behavior, and instantiate these through structured labs on pipeline hazards, cache performance, and branch prediction. A mixed-method evaluation in an advanced microarchitecture course contrasts a control group using traditional 2D tools with an experimental group using the VR lab over 4–6 weeks. According to quantitative findings, the VR group outperformed the control group by 24.5% in post-test scores, decisive the idea that immersive collaborative contact is a key factor in conceptual understanding. The cloud-based architecture may provide responsive multi-user experiences under practical bandwidth limits, as shown by system-level metrics like latency and frame rate. Future integration of hardware-in-the-loop and adaptive learning analytics will be informed by qualitative feedback from instructors and students that demonstrates how immersive visualization and collaborative interaction may demystify complicated microarchitectural behavior and ease remote teaching.