Gaming & Virtual Worlds Research Area

I-Corps Translational Strategies for Experiential Supercomputing
PI: Win Burleson (The University of Arizona)
Co-PIs: Gustavo De Oliveira Almeida, Steven Wood (The University of Arizona)
Funding: National Science Foundation, $50,000
Project Dates: September 1, 2025 – August 31, 2026
Summary:
This I-Corps project will advance translational strategies for the NSF MRI Holodeck in the areas of health and education. The Holodeck is a first-of-its-kind experiential supercomputing environment. It is a well-integrated, immersive, collaborative, virtual/physical extended reality environment providing unparalleled tools for research collaborations, intellectual exploration, education, and creative output. It incorporates visual, audio, and physical components; novel AI technologies to enhance human-human, human-agent, and human-robot social interactions; rapid prototyping and fabrication tools; and tightly coupled interactive visual, audio, and physical experiences. The Holodeck provides a flexible, modular, reconfigurable infrastructure with a comprehensive capacity to capture and analyze behavioral, physiological, affective, cognitive, contextual and environmental data.  It is capable of providing real-time immersive data visualization and haptic experience coupled with sophisticated co-located and distributed digital twinning capabilities.
Awards: 2025 NSF Spirit of I-Corps Award

VCR: Virtual Cognitive Rehabilitation Using a Virtual Reality Spatial Navigation Application for Veterans with a History of Traumatic Brain Injury
PI: Jonathan Lifshitz (University of Michigan)
Co-PIs: Lila Boz, Ren Boz (The University of Arizona), Matthew Law (University of Michigan)
Funding: Arizona Veterans Research and Education Foundation, $499,669
Project Dates: August 31, 2024 – August 31, 2027
Publications: “Insights from the Participatory Design of a Virtual Reality Spatial Navigation Application for Veterans with a History of TBI,” IEEE Xplore, 2024
Summary:
This research aims to deliver cognitive rehabilitation for individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury through a virtual reality serious game featuring five novel virtual environments populated with randomly generated spots. The researchers hypothesize that exposure to novel environments may activate neural populations important to spatial learning, thereby potentially facilitating cognitive rehabilitation. Users explore these environments and complete destination-finding tasks across multiple levels with gradually increasing difficulty.