Anthropology
VRchaeology
Led by: Dr. Laura Shackelford and Dan Cermak’s Stu/dio
Website
VRchaeology teaches archaeological field methods using immersive virtual reality (VR) so that all students can learn archaeology without leaving the classroom. This is a test case for field sciences more broadly. Find out more about our projects to promote accessibility for field research.
Business
Disruption Lab at Gies College of Business
Website 1 & Website 2
Working with disruptive technology such as blockchain, NFT’s, VR, quantum computing and more to develop projects for clients
Check out our Tech Lab and Incubator if you are interested in joining!
Carle Illinois College of Medicine
The Jump Simulation Center
Website
The University of Illinois has launched the Jump Simulation Center with a generous $10 million gift from Jump Trading, with the mission of training a new type of doctor, uniquely equipped to transform health care. Located on the Urbana campus, the new center provides all the simulation needs of the new Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the first medical school in the nation focused—from the beginning—at the intersection of engineering and medicine.
Computer Science
ILLIXR
Led by: Dr. Sarita Adve and PhD candidate Muhammad Huzaifa
Website
Illinois Extended Reality testbed or ILLIXR (pronounced like elixir) is the first fully open-source Extended Reality (XR) system and testbed. The modular, extensible, and OpenXR-compatible ILLIXR runtime integrates state-of-the-art XR components into a complete XR system. The testbed is part of the broader ILLIXR consortium, an industry-supported community effort to democratize XR systems research, development, and benchmarking.
Curriculum & Instruction
Embodied and Immersive Technologies (EmIT) Group
Led by: Dr. Robb Lindgren
Website
The Embodied and Immersive Technologies (EmIT) Group in the College of Education at the University of Illinois aims to explore the potential of emerging technologies—particularly those that allow for physical and embodied interactions—for generating powerful learning experiences. The EmIT group leverages the significant expertise of faculty and students at Illinois in both the development of cutting-edge technology as well as an understanding of how people learn concepts and skills in a variety of domains. Our goal is to create transformative new technologies that have measurable effects on student learning and engagement and to disseminate these designs and related research to have maximum impact on schools and informal educational environments.
Electrical & Computer Engineering
Immersive Learning Lab
Led by: Dr. Raluca Ilie
Website
Prof. Ilie is leading the development of the Virtual Reality Laboratory at ECE Illinois, that constitutes a disruptive and vastly influential platform for teaching and learning, in an immersive, realistic and, most importantly, interactive 3-dimensional environment. The current VR experiences are designed to cover topics for an electromagnetism class, and they provide the means for learning through exploration. The VR platform allow instructors to design and visualize objects in a virtual space, representing both physical objects (like charged particles and materials) and abstract objects like fields, lines of force, etc.
Games Studies & Design
The Stu/dio
Led by: Dan Cermak
Website
We are the first student-led studio representing and supporting the interests and needs of a diverse and technologically-advanced university. The faculty we work with are looking to design and develop video games to supplement learning and research inside and outside of the classroom through interactive programs.
Health Care Engineering Systems Center
Virtual Reality Laboratory
Website
The students and faculty here are pioneering the use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in areas such as surgery, remote robotic control and future cyberphysical systems. The faculty involved in our projects pool their expertise from fields as diverse as mathematics, mechanical sciences, computer science, aerospace engineering and medical sciences.
Our work is supported by National Science Foundation, Jump ARCHES endowment, and industrial support from many sources. Please contact us if you have an idea for a collaborative project.
Our VR Lab is located in the Health Care Engineering Systems Center at CSL Studios.
Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering
Virtual Reality Laboratory
Director: Dr. T. Kesavadas
Website
This Virtual Reality lab focuses on fundamental and applied research in virtual reality and robotics for medical applications. Research in virtual reality includes surgical simulations as well as development of virtual training environments and curriculums.
Interdisciplinary
IMMERSE: Center for Immersive Computing
Led by: Dr. Sarita Adve, Dr. Romit Roy Choudhury, Dr. Klara Nahrstedt, and Dr. Eric Shaffer
Website
Immersive computing promises the seamless integration of the virtual with the physical. It includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR, VR, and MR), collectively extended reality (XR), digital twins, the metaverse, spatial computing, and earable computing.
Immersive computing is poised to change how we design, program, and interact with computing. It has the potential to transform most human activities, including education, healthcare, science, arts, crisis response, industrial design, manufacturing, maintenance, agriculture, retail, social interactions, entertainment, and more.
Yet, many challenges remain before we can achieve the full promise of comfortable, mobile, responsive systems that offer rich, collaborative immersive experiences. Learn how IMMERSE is addressing these challenges.
Technology Social Behavior Lab
Led by: Dr. Mike Yao and Dr. Leona Yi-Fan Su
Website
The Media, Technology, and Social Behavior (MTSB) Research Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is dedicated to transdisciplinary explorations at the interactions of technology, society, and human communication. We study how people use and interact with new tech, how it shapes our social behaviors, and the ways we communicate in these digital spaces.
Journalism, ICR, and Informatics
STEM DiVRsity
Led by: Dr. Christopher Ball
Kinesiology & Community Health
Mobility and Fall Prevention Research Laboratory
Website
The goal of the lab is to further our understanding of the volitional control of compensatory postural responses and contribute to the existing body of fall prevention research in older adults.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of our work, this lab collaborates with colleagues in Medicine, Neuroscience, Physics, Engineering, and Kinesiology across the University of Illinois campus and other national universities and institutions.
Physics
POINT (Physics Outreach and Instruction through New Technologies)
Led by: Kristen Schumacher, Sonali Joshi, and Dr. Eric Shaffer
Website
Physics Outreach and Instruction through New Technologies (POINT) is an ICASU project aimed at generating interest in physics for middle school and high school students through virtual reality (VR). Our goal is to increase student engagement with science and encourage more students to pursue AP and college physics courses.
This project includes three major goals:
- To investigate the benefits of using VR to explain physics in local classrooms.
- To develop further simulations to explain the fundamental physics of gravity and general relativity.
- To incorporate existing VR science demonstrations into outreach programs.
University Library
Project Komodo
Led by: Brandon C Dang
Website
Project Komodo is an upcoming SDK and web service that will make it easy for instructors to deploy social virtual reality education apps.
Want to add your lab to this list? Please contact us at: vrillinois@lists.illinois.edu