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CollabXR Program

Call for applications: Purdue Innovation Hub & Envision Center  

Purpose 

The Purdue Envision Center, in partnership with the Purdue Innovation Hub, invites applications for candidate projects to participate in building the next generation of academic extended reality (XR) experiences. This program will broaden the opportunity for members of campus to work with the Envision Center's premier XR lab offering, CollabXR: a collaborative, multi-user virtual and augmented reality platform that provides faculty an expansion to their instruction and research toolkits and the ability to engage immersive three-dimensional (3D) visualization materials alongside their students within an 'XR classroom.' 

Program Description 

Program priorities. The Purdue Innovation Hub & Envision Center CollabXR Program will support projects with the potential to impact the quality of teaching and learning at Purdue via collaborative, instructor-led, hands-on experiences and communication surrounding the immersive 3D presentation of materials. Applications are invited to achieve such goals as: 

  • Visualization of scientific 3D data: volumetric models, lidar/point clouds, isosurfaces, etc.

    • Examples: medical/veterinary anatomical models, meteorological volumes, molecular/microscopic visualizations, engineering/CAD data

  • Visualization of arts, humanities and social sciences: photogrammetry scans, 3D models, animations, etc.

    • Examples: immersive experiences of historical and cultural heritage sites and artifacts

  • Any other shared spatial viewing experience you believe would benefit your students in CollabXR—make your case! 

All faculty members on the West Lafayette campus are eligible to apply for this program. 

Program parameters and expectations. This program is intended to support the development of a broad array of new XR experiences to help establish Purdue as a global leader in leveraging XR technologies at scale in research and learning. This initial collection of projects will focus on the aspect of data integration into the platform, emphasizing the collaborative viewing experience, so there will be only minimal (if any) custom interaction development available depending upon the requirements of the content. The selected faculty applicants will work directly with the Envision Center staff to integrate their visualization and develop their desired XR experience. Depending on the complexity and readiness of materials for the selected project, we anticipate the faculty investing 5-10 hours of their time across the March development period. When the project is completed, these faculty members will have their XR module deployed to the CollabXR platform where it can be used in one or more interactive sessions with students from their classes through the month of April. (See 'Notes for applicants' section below for information about group size limits and data collection.) 

Application Process 

To apply, please complete this online form. Be sure to submit your application by 5pm ET February 21st 2025. 

Apply Here

Notes for applicants 

  • To ensure smooth execution of sessions, participant group sizes are currently limited to 15 students (if you have more than 15 students participating, they can be divided into separate session groups of up to 15 students each, with a limit of 3 such groups for up to 45 students total) 

  • All CollabXR session participants will be requested to provide consent to recorded sessions (for CollabXR promotional purposes) 

  • CollabXR session participants may be requested to provide voluntary responses to data collection (for example, informal surveys to evaluate performance and feedback relevant to the experience) 

If your project is selected, the program roadmap will follow this process: