VR-REU: Research Experience for Undergraduates in Immersive 3D Visualization

8-Weeks, Paid Research

June 6 – July 29, 2022

The VR-REU program in immersive visualization and virtual/augmented/mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) involved 10 students per summer directly in multidisciplinary research projects. Participants were provided training in immersive 3D visualization tools and technologies. The objective of the program is to inspire participating students to consider STEM as a career path and pursue STEM careers at the graduate level, and specifically target participation of women and underrepresented groups. The program identified research collaborators with immersive visualization needs and assign each student to a REU team. Each REU team consisted of a research mentor and a REU student. The mentoring team includes members not just from CS but also from diverse backgrounds including film and media, journalism and biological sciences. Participants gained hands-on experience doing creative VR/AR/MR and 3D Visualization projects. Students participated in mentored research projects in data driven research areas, including scientific visualization and visual analytics. Some of the planned research projects include: VR for aiding students with learning disabilities, MicroRNA (Ribonucleic Acid) as a regulator for cell lineage plasticity, immersive remote telepresence, sonifying the microbiome, and visualization of deep learning model architecture. This experience included excursions and social events. In addition to the exposure to cutting edge research, students selected to participate received a travel stipend for one round trip to and from New York City, a housing allowance, a weekly stipend ($600 per week) to cover living expenses and access to research faculty and VR/AR/MR resources to help facilitate their success in the program.

Application Process

Funding was available for 10 undergraduate students in Summer 2022. There were 135 applications and all applications submitted before the priority application deadline of February 18, 2022 were fully considered. For the summer of 2022, the VR-REU program was held in person at CUNY – Hunter College.

REU Participants 2022

VR-REU Symposium: Final presentations were held (in-person/zoom) on July 29, 2022 (9am – 4pm).

VR-REU 2022 Publications

1. Aisha Frampton-Clerk and Oyewole Oyekoya. 2022. Investigating the Perceived Realism of the Other User’s Look-Alike Avatars. In 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’22), November29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565636 – pdf
2. Zhenchao Xia, Oyewole Oyekoya, and Hao Tang. 2022. Effective Gesture-Based User Interfaces on Mobile Mixed Reality. In Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI ’22), December 1–2, 2022, Online, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3565970.3568189 – pdf
3. Talia Attar, Oyewole Oyekoya, and Margrethe F. Horlyck-Romanovsky. 2022. Using Virtual Reality Food Environments to Study Individual Food Consumer Behavior in an Urban Food Environment. In 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’22), November 29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565685 – pdf
4. Diego Rivera. 2022. Visualizing Machine Learning in 3D. In 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’22), November 29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565688 – pdf
5. Amelia Roth and Daniel Lichtman. 2022. The Community Game Development Toolkit. In 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’22), November 29-December 1, 2022, Tsukuba, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565661 – pdf

This REU Site is sponsored by NSF Grant No. 2050532 and is directed by the PI, Dr Wole Oyekoya.

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