The COVID-19 resurgence on the Chinese Mainland has once again disrupted university education, with most teaching moving off-campus and students taking classes online at home. But a cornerstone of science education has been a challenge: the laboratory class. Although, a virtual reality lab has been set up at Dalian University of Technology recently, it enables key concepts to be explored in a practical way that can be live streamed to students' monitors. The online platform also maintains a high degree of interaction since multiple students can be logged onto the same experiment at once. Such online facilities involve expertise in engineering and computing as well as laboratory teaching.