He was the Director of ICT as well as the founding Principal Investigator of the University's iLab group in collaboration with MIT, USA. Currently, he coordinates a State Research and Educational Network. His present work includes developing virtual and remote labs for students' experimentation. He just concluded a three-year visiting Professor job at the

Realistic interfaces for iLab-based operational amplifier experiments have previously been reported. Motivated by experiences and students' feedback gathered in the past, an even more realistic interface for op-amp experimentation using iLab technology is hereby presented.The emphasis in the current work was on the design of a new client and consequently, the system under test (SUT) remains largely unchanged from previously-reported iterations of the lab. The only notable exception is that in the current SUT, the operational amplifier circuit also allows the construction of a difference amplifier. As before, remote configurability and data acquisition are achieved through a 100-channel switch array and a NI USB-6251 DAQ card controlled by the experiment engine respectively.The realistic-looking interface of the circuit is implemented using Adobe Flex technology. It utilizes a metaphor fabricated around realistic images of the breadboards, electronic components and instruments. To allow the flexibility available in a real lab where students can utilize an arbitrary set of breadboard nodes in wiring up a particular circuit, the client utilizes a depth-firstsearch algorithm to construct circuits from an arbitrary number of student node-to-node connections. An attempt was made to prevent student disorientation by employing the use of intuitive control actions to zoom and pan the view, as well as hide interface elements as desired.Lab assessment was done in two phases. First, a questionnaire was administered to students after using the lab. Their responses were compared with those for a previous generation of the operational amplifier lab. Secondly, a small study was carried out to verify a previous argument that realistic interfaces improved students' laboratory experience. The results of the study are discussed and attempts are made to extend the implications to other remote laboratories. Furthermore, the performance of the LabVIEW dll approach to experiment control is compared with a previous approach using the NI DAQmx library.