Other Work
Projects outside my main research focus: qualitative research with teachers, research and industry collaborations in extended reality, learning technologies, 3D modeling, games you can play right here, and talks and panels.
- Qualitative Research
- Research and Industry Collaborations
- Learning Technologies
- 3D Modeling, Lighting, and Texturing
- Video Games
- Talks & Panels
Qualitative Research
Teachers’ Perspectives on Technologies for Science Labs
To find out what science labs actually need, I went to the people who run them. I visited 7 schools, surveyed 58 teachers, and interviewed 18 teachers across a wide range of socioeconomic contexts.
The clearest need was that teachers want technology to augment hands-on labs, not replace them. Students learn the most by handling real equipment and working through messy, real data, but most lab technology swaps the experiment for a “perfect” simulation. That finding became the motivation for my research.
Tools & techniques: Needfinding, classroom observation, surveys, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative analysis.
Research and Industry Collaborations
Augmented and Virtual Reality for Distance Learning
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024
A first-author journal survey of how AR and VR can support distance learning. It synthesizes prior work on social presence, engagement, comprehension, and instructor tools, and lays out the challenges that remain, from headset comfort to no-code tools that let teachers build their own lessons.
Tools & techniques: Literature review and synthesis, AR and VR system analysis, and academic writing.
Seeing Inside Sealed Robots with AR
Lam Research · Global Products Engineering
Industrial robots often run inside opaque enclosures for safety and to reduce contamination, which makes errors hard to diagnose. HoloLens applications show the robot as a hologram that follows the real robot’s motion, turning numbers on a screen into something engineers can see in space. Going beyond the assigned work, a self-initiated internal application visualizes what the robot was doing right before an error, helping technicians pinpoint and diagnose the issue.
Tools & techniques: Microsoft HoloLens, AR application development, robot data visualization, and UX design for industrial diagnostics.
Learning Technologies
Interactive Thermodynamics Simulation
An interactive 3D simulation for undergraduate thermodynamics. Students manipulate the vapor dome, a 3D surface relating temperature, pressure, and entropy, and watch how it produces the 2D diagrams used in thermodynamic analysis. It has been used in courses at the University of Maryland.
Tools & techniques: Unity, 3D data visualization, and interactive simulation design.
AR Flashcard Games
Two mobile AR games that turn studying flashcards into play. Students import a deck from Quizlet or create their own in the app, and the cards become augmented reality games for memorizing the material.
Tools & techniques: Mobile augmented reality, educational game design, and importing study sets from Quizlet.
3D Modeling, Lighting, and Texturing
A bed modeled from scratch (left), then lit and textured to look like old CCTV footage (right).
Tools & techniques: Autodesk Maya, 3D modeling, lighting, and texturing.
Video Games
Feeding Turnips
A Unity game built as a team, where players care for a turnip by feeding and watering it, with a twist ending once its satisfaction bar fills.
Tools & techniques: Unity, C#, and team-based game design.
The Rhythm of Fuzzy Wuzzy
A quick rhythm game: use the WASD keys to jump over puddles, duck under bridges, and fight off birds to escape. Click the game first so it picks up your keys.
Tools & techniques: Unity, C#, and rhythm-based gameplay design.
Talks & Panels
- Workshop host, Purposeful XR: Affordances, Challenges, and Speculations for an Ethical Future, ACM CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan
- Panelist, The Educational Rift in Spatial Reasoning, Augmented World Expo 2024, Long Beach, CA
- Panel moderator, XR in Education, Stanford XR Conference 2023
- Demo presenter, Mobile AR Learning, Stanford XR Conference 2022