Within the Electrical Engineering field of study, the understanding of some equipment can be frustrating and demotivating due to lack of a clear vision of how these devices work and operate in a real environment. Both students and professionals find it difficult to meet or train with this equipment, by factors such as safety, cost of maintaining a laboratory or impediments to training in real installations. Various forms of teaching and learning have been used to enhance this practical aspect of learning in Electrical Engineering. Among these forms, the use of virtual reality has had good results by providing a safe, controlled environment and inexpensive compared to an actual laboratory. However, there are still gaps that can be addressed in these experiments, for example, serve both students and professionals, ease of creation of laboratories and play real situations of equipment, nearing the theory of the practice. Thus, this thesis proposes a conceptual framework for creating virtual labs to fill these gaps. A systematic review was conducted to collect characteristics, opportunities and challenges of this issue. The framework presents methods, techniques and best practices for defining, creating, implementing and measuring virtual reality experiments applied to Electrical Engineering. Experiments are presented which were performed to validate the framework. An experiment demonstrates the teaching of operating electrical transformers in substations for undergraduate students of Electrical Engineering. Another experiment trains professionals to operation and maintenance of a hydro generator turbine at a hydroelectric plant. The results show that the framework enabled the best practical study to show actual scenarios and situations of the concepts presented and improved aspects of teaching and learning as notes, motivation and retention of knowledge for both students and professionals as to the teacher.
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