Andrew Rukangu defends his dissertation
Andrew Rukangu defended his PhD dissertation, "From Robots to Realities: Engineering Extended Reality for Learning and Collaboration."
College of Engineering · University of Georgia
We build virtual experiences that help people work, learn and heal together.
The Virtual Experiences Laboratory designs, builds and studies virtual, augmented and mixed reality, from shared spaces where groups think together to interfaces for robots, virtual patients and hands-on engineering education.
What we study
Four threads run through our work
01
Shared spaces
Collaborative and social XR: people in the same room, or across the world, thinking and making together.
5 projects02Robots & physical systems
Mixed reality as the interface to robots and machines: teleoperation, programming and digital twins.
4 projects03Health & medicine
Virtual patients, therapy and health behavior, built with clinicians and tested with the people they serve.
9 projects04Learning by doing
Immersive practice for engineering, science and professional education, from the classroom to the field.
18 projectsNow in the lab
All projectsActive projects
Drawn Together
A co-located mixed reality space where groups sketch, annotate and build ideas together in the room they are standing in.
RobotCommand XR
Teleoperating a quadruped robot through mixed reality, with a live 3D point cloud of what the robot sees.
Figure: Johnsen et al., IEEE VR 2025 WorkshopsHEAL-XR
Virtual reality therapy for people after limb loss, developed with surgeons and therapists to ease phantom limb pain and support recovery.
Mixed Reality Robot Programming
Letting every engineering student program an industrial-scale robot arm, using augmented reality to bridge virtual and physical robots.
Trust in Human-Robot Teams
How people and autonomous robots come to trust each other when they work as a team, studied in controlled virtual environments.
NERVE
Virtual patients for practicing the neurological exam, used by medical and veterinary schools for more than a decade.
News
All newsLatest from the lab
Point cloud teleoperation paper at ACM SUI 2026
Our study of real-time point clouds for quadruped robot teleoperation was presented at the ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction in Bari, Italy.
Kyle Johnsen joins Computers & Graphics as Associate Editor
Kyle Johnsen has joined the editorial board of the Elsevier journal Computers & Graphics as an Associate Editor, serving through 2029.
Partners
Who we work with
- Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI)UGA's institute for AI research and education.
- Georgia Informatics Institutes (GII)UGA's informatics institutes for research and education.
- Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems (CACHE)An interdisciplinary hub for human-computing systems that support communication and behavior change.
- Manufacturing Living LabsUGA's manufacturing research, education and industry-engagement program.
- The Innovation FactoryAn advanced manufacturing and Industry 4.0 lab, with an assembly line and collaborative robots.
Curious about XR? Come build with us.
We work with graduate and undergraduate students from engineering, computing and beyond, and with collaborators across campus and industry.