Facilities
ORCL's lab in Thornton Hall, Room D107, is where we build and run immersive experiments. Riders pedal a real bicycle or ride an e-scooter on a motion platform while wearing a headset, pedestrians walk room-scale through virtual streets, and drivers take the wheel of a virtual car, while eye trackers and wearable sensors record where people look and how their bodies respond. The same equipment goes into the field with instrumented e-scooters and mobile eye trackers, and 3D scanners turn real streets and buildings into virtual ones.
The Lab at a Glance
4 Immersive simulators
Bicycle, e-scooter, pedestrian and driving.
25 VR, AR and MR headsets
Meta Quest, HTC Vive Pro Eye, Apple Vision Pro and Microsoft HoloLens.
5 GPU workstations
For running simulators, building virtual worlds and training models.
2 Mobile eye trackers
Tobii Pro Glasses 3 for studies on the street and in the lab.
Inside the Lab
The simulators, the virtual streets they run and the people who try them.
Bicycle simulator. A rider pedals a real bicycle on a smart trainer while the virtual street plays on the screen.
Eye tracking. The bicycle simulator's HTC Vive Pro Eye headset records where the rider looks.
Steering and speed. HTC Vive controllers on the handlebars and a wheel sensor capture steering and speed.
Research Day 2026. A lab member demonstrates the bicycle simulator to visitors in the ORCL lab.
Research Day 2024. Visitors try the bicycle simulator at the Link Lab's industry and graduate student reception. Photo by Amanda Maglione.
Research Day 2023. PhD student Arman Hosseini runs a visitor through the bicycle simulator. Photo by Andrew Shurtleff.
Equipment and Specifications
The simulators, headsets and sensors below are the equipment ORCL’s projects run on. Each simulator links to the research it supports.
Simulators
The bicycle, e-scooter and pedestrian simulators run the same VR street scenes. The driving simulator uses a separate environment built in Unreal Engine.
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Bicycle simulator (ORCLSim)
A Trek Verve bicycle on a Wahoo KICKR smart trainer, with a KICKR Climb for road grade and a fan for wind. A Hall-effect wheel sensor, a working brake lever and HTC Vive controllers on the handlebars capture speed, braking and steering. Riders wear an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset.
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E-scooter simulator
An e-scooter on a three-degree-of-freedom Sigma DK2+ motion platform that reproduces leaning and road feedback, with an Arduino wheel sensor, a steering controller and a Meta Quest 3 headset.
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Pedestrian simulator
Room-scale walking through the same VR street scenes, with the walker's movement and gaze recorded.
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Driving simulator
A steering wheel and pedals with a VR driving environment.
Headsets
The lab has 25 VR, AR and MR headsets. The three families below carry most of the research; the Microsoft HoloLens headsets are listed in the table further down.
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Meta Quest (including Quest 3)
15 headsets. The e-scooter simulator uses a Quest 3.
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HTC Vive Pro (including Vive Pro Eye)
5 headsets, including the Vive Pro Eye with built-in eye tracking. The bicycle simulator uses a Vive Pro Eye.
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Apple Vision Pro
2 headsets, one of them shared with a partner lab.
Physiological and Behavioral Sensing
Every simulator run can be synchronized with the rider’s or walker’s physiological signals. On the bicycle simulator, for example, the HTC Vive Pro Eye records gaze, a Polar H10 chest strap records heart rate and heart rate variability, a Grove GSR sensor on the fingers records electrodermal activity, the HTC Vive controllers on the handlebars track steering, and a Hall-effect sensor on the wheel measures speed.
| Sensor | Signal | Units |
|---|---|---|
| HTC Vive Pro Eye (built-in eye tracking) | Gaze, pupil diameter, head movement | See Headsets |
| Tobii Pro Glasses 3 | Mobile eye tracking on the street and in the lab | 2 |
| Polar H10 chest strap | Heart rate and heart rate variability | 1 |
| Grove GSR sensor with an Arduino | Electrodermal activity | 1 |
| Wheel speed sensors (Hall-effect, Arduino) | Speed on the bicycle and e-scooter simulators | 2 |
Also in the Lab
| Equipment | Details |
|---|---|
| Microsoft HoloLens 2 (2) | Augmented and mixed reality headsets |
| Microsoft HoloLens, first generation (1) | Augmented and mixed reality headset |
| Instrumented Segway Ninebot e-scooters | Naturalistic riding data from an Intel RealSense D435i depth camera and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano computer |
| Matterport Pro3 camera | 3D scans of buildings and sites |
Computing and Software
Five GPU workstations with Intel Core i9 processors, 64 GB of memory and NVIDIA RTX graphics run the simulators and development work. The bicycle, e-scooter and pedestrian simulators are built in Unity (C#), and the lab also works in Unreal Engine and NVIDIA Omniverse. Laser scans become Gaussian-splat and mesh models of real streets, and large language model toolchains drive AI characters in training scenarios.
Shared UVA Resources
ORCL is part of the UVA Link Lab, whose Arena, Hardware Prototyping Lab and Living Link Lab are open to lab members. Researchers also use UVA Research Computing, including the Rivanna and Afton clusters and an NVIDIA DGX BasePOD with 18 nodes of eight A100 GPUs each.
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Visit the Lab
We host tours and demonstrations for classes, K-12 groups, agencies and industry partners, and we welcome collaborators who want to run studies in our simulators. Send a tour request through our contact page, or email [email protected].