Designing Immersion: Four works from the Berkeley XR Lab

The I School Research Exchange is open to I School faculty, I School Ph.D. students, I School visiting scholars, and invited guests.

Immersive design technologies demand new languages and ways of engaging that reflect the embodied nature of the immersive experience. In XR environments, human movement becomes an interface, and space itself becomes responsive, shaping a dynamic dialogue between body, perception, and information. 

This talk presents four projects from the Berkeley XR Lab that position context, embodiment, and social impact as primary drivers of technological innovation: 

1. CoDesignX allows pediatric patients to participate in the design of healthcare spaces, using a combination of immersive virtual environments and biometrics. This novel way of understanding how children perceive and experience healthcare spaces becomes a generative design process to enhance patient wellbeing and reduce stress.
2. Virtual Bauer Wurster, developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, transformed the College of Environmental Design into a social VR digital twin, enabling real-time shared experiences of student projects, and collaborative agency during a time of physical isolation.
3. BAMPFA AR: Augmented Time reinterpreted architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s adaptive reuse of an industrial building in downtown Berkeley into an art museum, extending its narrative to embed the lost voices of construction workers.
4. Most recently, the SolarShare project used augmented reality to raise awareness on neighborhood-scale energy sharing, demonstrating how distributed renewable systems can generate financial value while addressing energy vulnerability in underserved communities. 

Together, these projects argue for XR not as a neutral medium, but as a spatial, social, and ethical practice, one where immersive technologies gain relevance through their capacity to engage real contexts and produce meaningful impact.