UW-Milwaukee Researchers Use Virtual Reality to Create Change

Virtual Reality is a new and powerful technology, and UW-Milwaukee’s Immersive Media Lab is working to uncover all of its possibilities.

This lab is a group of students and researches from all different majors and interests including linguistics, graphic design, digital studio practice and many more. The researchers within the lab work together and independently to study their respective interests within the realm of extended reality. This includes augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality.

The lab is facilitated by UWM Lecturer Christopher Willey. Willey believes that extended reality can change the way education is run and he is working towards creating a space to discover that.

“[The lab] is a place for new forms of education, new forms of behaviors. It’s a place where people can find their passions and spend time with those passions,” said Willey. “It’s a place for anybody from any major to come together and see how separate skills with similar motivations can turn into impactful scholarship.”

The goal of the lab is for the researchers to work together to create, explore, and optimize extended reality in their subjects. They do this by getting into Virtual Reality Headsets and exploring the different technology and the future of that technology. The research conducted will be shared and passed down to other researchers as the lab continues.

Willey takes a more hands-off approach to teaching, and conducting the lab, while being as available to the researchers as possible.

“I can be a force behind them to propel once they figure out their trajectory,” said Willey. “But I can’t tell them what their trajectory is.”

One of the researchers, Samuel Kotrba, a sophomore at UWM studying Digital and Visual Communications, is working on studying graphic design within extended reality, and how new technologies can change graphic design.

“We follow all of these 2D based guidelines,” said Kotrba. “How are these going to change with VR? And on top of that, how do we start moving forward to change how we critically think and brain-storm about projects based in 3D realms.”

Kotrba also runs the Immersive Media Lab’s social media. He hopes to spread the word about the lab and what they are doing.

“So many people who could actually benefit from this, don’t know that they can benefit from it,” said Kotrba.

Another researcher, Aaron O’Connell, is a graduate student studying linguistics and Spanish. He got his undergraduate degree in Spanish and Spanish education and is researching and developing technology to teach languages within an extended reality realm.

O’Connell has developed a prototype that lays out his plans to allow people to travel to other countries within virtual reality, and have conversations with people in their native language. He hopes to bring these language immersion labs into classrooms in the future.

There are many researchers that work in the lab that have been working for months on expanding their knowledge about extended reality, and about how it can help people. Willey has expressed that this technology has the potential to change the way people behave.

Using virtual reality to connect with people in other countries, such as Syria or Pakistan, where tragedies are happening, can help us further empathize and understand how people are affected by such tragedies.

“The second we get to know these individuals and we hear their lives in a language that’s our language, we will feel differently,” said Willey. “And my hope is that that will change us, and will change our behavior.”

Both the functions of the lab and its researchers, including their freedoms and resources, and the near-endless possibilities of extended reality, create a solid base for the Immersive Media Lab. While expanding creativity, motivation, and knowledge, the researchers in the lab have the ability to produce work that could benefit humans on a large scale, according to Willey.

“Its interdisciplinary at it’s core, but then together we are all motivated to make some real impactful changes,” said Willey.

The Immersive Media Lab is located on the fifth floor of the Kenilworth Square East. The open lab days are every Friday from 12pm-2pm. Any visitors are welcome.