Teaching

Courses and research experiences that teach students to design and build immersive environments.
Students from the spring 2025 World Building with Virtual and Augmented Reality course in ORCL.

ORCL brings virtual and augmented reality into the engineering curriculum. Students learn to build immersive environments in a semester-long course and can go on to join the lab's research projects, working with the same street models, headsets and simulators.

Courses

World Building with Virtual and Augmented Reality (CE 4500 and CE 6500). A new Civil and Environmental Engineering course, offered in spring 2025, fall 2025 and spring 2026, in which student teams design and build virtual and augmented reality applications in Unity, often for transportation, civil engineering and real estate problems. Taught by Dr. Sepehr Sabeti, adjunct professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering, the course grew from 10 students in its first offering to 18 in spring 2026, and several of its projects, including ORCL's VR e-scooter simulator, have continued as lab research.

Enhancing Civil Engineering Curriculum with Virtual and Augmented Reality (2019–2020). A UVA Education Innovation Award, led by Donna Chen with Arsalan Heydarian and Devin Harris, that first brought VR and AR into civil engineering courses.

Research Experience

Undergraduate and graduate students can join ORCL projects as researchers, building VR scenes, programming simulators and helping run studies. See Who We Are for current students, and email [email protected] to ask about openings.