In my junior fall I wanted to continue working on collaborative XR projects, but unfortunately there was no place at Duke for that, so I took the initiative and started Duke’s first XR club, Devils Cross Reality (DXR). The goal of the club was to create an XR community at Duke and to teach students about what’s going on in the space by providing them resources, equipment, and an opportunity to collaborate on projects with other students. For me this was a chance to gain experience as a leader in the XR space, and I saw it as a stepping stone for eventually starting my own XR company. It wasn’t easy to get things going though, as I had to drag my giant computer and Vive setup across campus for demos, apply for funding, and get people to show up to meetings without being able to enforce commitments. There was a lot of student interest though, and our email list serve quickly grew to around 400 people. Since there are limited classes or other ways to learn about XR at Duke, I started hosting workshops on Unity development for VR through DXR and the club has become the place to go for any students new to XR.

The most personally beneficial outcome of starting DXR was that my passion for XR was finally out in the public, which made it significantly easier to network with others in the industry. I connected with a Durham based XR startup, Lucid Dream, that is run by some Duke alumni and works on custom projects for enterprise clients. They very kindly put me in touch with a woman looking to hire someone to give VR demos at her wedding, and I gladly took the opportunity. This was my first time giving public demos outside of the Duke community, and at this gig it became much clearer to me that there is a very wide range of reactions that people have when they first try VR. Depending on their age, history with video games, eagerness to try new things, and many other factors that are hard to pinpoint, everyone that tried VR had a unique experience. Some wanted to take the headset off within the first minute, others kept it on until I forced them to let someone else get a turn. Overall, the feedback was very positive, and people were glad to have the opportunity.

October 2017

I wanted to continue taking classes with open ended projects so I could block out time to make more VR apps, so in my junior fall I took a class called Virtual Museums, which involved a final project on creating a digitally enhanced museum piece. I also happened to be taking another course on the history of jazz, and my group ended up working with the professor of that course in creating a history of jazz VR museum. The idea was that we would use VR to create a museum experience that went beyond what’s possible with a real-world museum. For every piece in the museum, when you walk up to it a song relevant to that piece would play, making use of spatial audio. We also added features like instruments that would play when you picked them up so you could pretend like you were playing them, a station for arranging different sections of jazz songs to demonstrate how composers arrange songs, and a 360-video recording of a jazz performance at Duke.

Researching VR's Educational Potential

In my junior spring I took Duke’s only class on VR, Virtual Reality Systems Research, a graduate course taught by Dr. Kopper (who runs the DiVE lab). The primary purpose of the class was to conduct a research study related to the field of virtual reality. I was really interested in the potential applications of VR in education, and my partner and I decided to research VR’s effect on memory to try and find evidence that 3D visualizations are inherently more memorable. Prior research has shown that more sensory information correlates to better retention of information, and we felt this would provide a good basis for why VR should be used in education. At the end of our study our results showed that people enjoyed memorization with 3D objects more than with flashcards, but our quantitative results on memory retention were mixed and did not fully support our hypothesis. It appeared that 3D visualizations helped memorization in certain situations, but like any psychological study it was difficult to truly understand what factors were at the root of the results we got. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about the process of doing research in the field of VR and got a better understanding of how I might go about future research.

October 2018

One day I came across a LinkedIn post about an organization called the ARVR Academy, a group focused on diversity and inclusion in the XR space, and saw they were looking for mentors for their first cohort of mentor groups where women and people from underrepresented backgrounds in XR could learn about XR development. I was surprised to get accepted as a mentor given my age and experience but was very glad to have the opportunity to join what sounded like an awesome community of professionals that are passionate about the world of XR. I was matched with a group of women years ahead of me in work experience that were eager to learn about Unity and other XR tools, and it was inspiring to see how they balanced learning about this emerging technology with full-time jobs and familial responsibilities. The ARVR Academy is an incredible initiative that I’m excited to see grow because it’s imperative that the XR community is filled with people from all backgrounds, and I hope to see more diversity and inclusion in XR than the current tech community fosters.

Computer Science Education Using AR