About Us
IMMERSE, the Center for Immersive Computing, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign brings together expertise in immersive systems technologies, applications, and human factors to perform research, educate a new workforce, and build infrastructure that will enable a new era of immersive computing.
Technologies
We are developing new technologies that will enable immersive systems that provide comfortable, mobile, responsive, rich collaborative immersive experiences all day. We work in hardware, programming systems, runtime systems, networks, distributed systems, graphics, vision, AI, audio, and haptics. We collaborate across the system stack, co-design hardware, software, and algorithms, and drive our work with real applications and human-centric measures of goodness. We work closely with industry. We build real systems. Our history spans the deployment of the second CAVE at NCSA to starting the consumer VR revolution through the Occulus Rift.
Applications
We use immersive computing for education, healthcare, creative arts, science, engineering, architecture, industrial design, and more. Our unique technology-focused college of medicine is leading the way in using extended reality systems in training the next generation of doctors. Our award winning 3D visualizations have enabled numerous scientific discoveries and engineering solutions. We use AR to enable the audience to participate in our creative performances. Most pervasively we use immersive systems in our courses throughout campus from archaeology to electromagnetism. These diverse real world deployments provide real and difficult challenges enable unique collaborations between all thrusts of IMMERSE. From scaling XR labs to hundreds of collaborating students to developing human-centered methods for quantifying the effectiveness of our deployments, we provide an ideal testbed to move the future of immersive computing forward.
Human Experiences
We work on understanding, measuring, and improving how immersive systems can deliver on the promise of having a transformative impact on the end user - the human. We study how humans perceive their environment and respond to different immersive technologies to inform the design of immersive systems. We explore how immersive technologies can transform the classroom of the future, the hospital of the future, the manufacturing plant of the future, and more.