Have you ever been on the field at Memorial Stadium, standing next to the cheerleaders as they lead an “I-L-L” call-and-response during a football game? Or have you been onstage at Foellinger Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts while world-class musicians play?
With the help of a new interdisciplinary project from students in advertising and computer science, those and a few other quintessential Illinois experiences are just a mouse click – and a pair of virtual reality goggles – away.
The Illinois Virtual Reality Experience is a “greatest hits” campus tour that was created by students in a unique, interdisciplinary class that teams up advertising and computer science students.
Anna Yershova, a lecturer in computer science, and her husband – Steve LaValle, a professor of computer science at Illinois – were two of the early founders of Oculus VR, the California-based startup and maker of the Rift headset for video gaming.
After Oculus was bought by Facebook in 2014, the husband-and-wife duo returned to the Urbana campus and began teaching what was, at the time, the first virtual reality course based on the latest technology, Yershova said.
“It started with 100 students, and it has quickly grown in popularity,” she said.
Since virtual reality headsets are now a mainstream consumer technology product, Yershova and LaValle have increased the class size and moved to a bigger lab on the fourth floor of the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science to accommodate demand, Yershova said.
“For the past fall semester, we increased our enrollment to 200 students, and we now have a bigger lab with 21 workstations and a room you can walk around in,” she said.
Yershova realized early on that the class could benefit from an interdisciplinary approach.
“We started in the beginning with a number of projects that were a collaboration between us and another department. Each semester we try a different distribution of majors.”
For one of the fall semester’s projects, Yershova partnered with advertising professor Michelle Nelson’s class to create a virtual tour of the Urbana campus.
“It’s a showcase of these famous locations on campus that we think are cool, and we used virtual reality to explore them,” said Jake Zhang, a graduate student in advertising from China.
The tour starts, of course, at Alma Mater.
“And then we go through the Illini Union and see the Quad, and then take the viewer through a student’s normal, everyday life” – going to class, grabbing a bite to eat at Ikenberry Commons, studying at Grainger Engineering Library, and working out at
the Activities and Recreation Center, Zhang said.
The video could easily double as a recruiting pitch for prospective students or as a virtual tour of haunts old and new for alumni.
“It’s somewhat of a day-in-the-life – an overview to show people who haven’t been to this campus or haven’t been here in some time what we have to offer or what’s changed,” Zhang said. “And even if you do go here, chances are you’ve never been onstage at Krannert or on the field at Memorial Stadium. So there’s something for everyone to enjoy.”
Rishi Kumar, a junior from Naperville, Illinois, studying computer science who took the course, said the experience has changed his outlook on his career prospects.
“Apart from the project, the class as a whole has really made me think about where I want to take my career,” he said. “With virtual reality, there are so many potential applications in so many different fields. A few years ago, you used to hear that the future was mobile. Now, the future is virtual reality.”
Plus, it also doesn’t hurt that playing in the virtual reality sandbox is fun, Kumar said.
“Our project is just one example of what VR is capable of,” Kumar said. “There are so many different potential applications of it that the possibilities are almost endless.”
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