The Immersion Lab offers a platform to prototype new technologies that blend the physical and digital spaces. New displays and haptics will lead to new interactions in gaming and communication platforms. Technologies like rapid prototyping can be used to enable new mechanisms of play.
Explore Immersion Lab tools to interface physical and digital using the buttons below.
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Sample projects and research
Displaying a wider field of view in high resolution
Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) Associate Professor Juejun Hu received a 2019 MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program seed grant for his work on developing high-performance, ultra-thin immersive micro-displays for AR/VR applications. These displays, based on metasurface optics, will allow for a large, continuous field of view, on-demand control of optical wavefronts, high-resolution projection, and a compact, flat, lightweight engine. While current commercial waveguide AR/VR systems offer less than 45 degrees of visibility, Hu and his team aim to design a high-quality display with a field of view close to 180 degrees. Read more at MIT News.
Connecting the virtual and physical world
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) Professor Stefanie Mueller received a 2019 MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program seed grant for her project to enhance the user’s experience by developing a new type of gameplay with tighter virtual-physical connection. In Mueller’s game, the player unlocks a physical template after completing a virtual challenge, builds a prop from this template, and then, as the game progresses, can unlock new functionalities to that same item. The prop can be expanded upon and take on new meaning, and the user learns new technical skills by building physical prototypes.
Related MIT labs & centers
Human-Computer Interaction Engineering group
Photonic MATerials group