New XR Initiative at U-M

Professor Nebeling and members of the Information Interaction Lab are excited to share that they have been recognized as a key partner in U-M’s new major XR Initiative, which was recently announced by the Provost and endorsed by the President.

While the specifics and strategic goals are still in development, one of the most exciting first milestones for us in the lab will be a new set of online courses that will provide significant training in design and development of AR/VR technologies, together with frameworks for ethical, social, privacy, and security aware design of AR/VR apps, as well as guidelines and recommendations for creating new AR/VR spaces for research and development as well as teaching and learning, which will be particularly helpful for resource constrained environments such as many libraries and schools. These new learning materials will significantly expand on Professor Nebeling’s AR/VR/MR Teach-Out on Coursera, which has provided an introduction to AR/VR technologies to more than 2,400 active learners world-wide.

We have also started new collaborations with several key vendors in the AR/VR space.

We are so excited by the enthusiastic support and the new movements at U-M! If you are interested in supporting our efforts, please reach out to Professor Nebeling at nebeling@umich.edu.