Five Capacity Areas

Healthcare environments have a profound psychological and physiological impact on patients. While traditional design often relies on intuition, we replace speculation with empirical data. Using immersive virtual reality, we prototype healthcare facilities and test them with real users, ensuring every design decision is scientifically proven to improve outcomes before a single brick is laid.

Biophilia · Clinical

Biophilic Patient Rooms

Do plants and natural light in a patient room actually lower stress? A three-condition VR experiment measured it directly, with eye tracking, heart rate, and skin response alongside validated questionnaires.

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Veterans · Color

Exam Rooms for Military Patients

With active-duty military and veterans, testing how advancing versus receding exam-room color schemes change perceived crowding, the passage of time, emotion, and cognitive load.

Accessibility

Virtual Wheelchair Experience

A VR system that lets design teams experience their spaces from a wheelchair, revealing accessibility barriers while they are still cheap to fix.

Aging in Place

AR for Independent Living

Mobile augmented reality piloted in older adults' homes that helps people locate objects and access information, supporting safer, longer independent living, with high perceived usefulness and ease of use.

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Neurodiversity · IIDA

Neuroinclusive Hospitality

Design Differently: sensory-conscious hospitality environments designed for neurodivergent guests, funded by the IIDA Texas-Oklahoma Chapter.

Some skills are too risky, too costly, or too remote to practice in the real world. A trainee cannot repeatedly fall off a scaffold or ruin a side of beef. In VR they can, and every attempt is measured: not just what trainees say they learned, but confidence, mental workload, and retention.

USDA · $750K

Meat Industry 4.0

USDA-NIFA-funded VR, AR, and AI workshops taking meat cutting, processing, and safety skills to rural Oklahoma students and workers, built on two phases of needs assessment and simulation development with industry.

Construction

Fall Protection Training

Picture-based, video-based, and immersive VR training compared head-to-head for fall protection and line-of-fire hazards, measuring self-efficacy, cognitive load, and short-term skill pickup.

Multicultural Workforce

Training Across Languages

VR safety training for a multicultural building-maintenance workforce, testing which format best builds confidence and retention when language and background shape how training lands.

Future of Work

The Hybrid Office

A physical office, a passthrough mixed-reality workspace, and a fully immersive VR workspace compared on mood, workload, heart rate, and performance. The hybrid passthrough condition won on satisfaction.

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Pipeline · PETE

Industry Partnerships

Partnerships for Excellence in Technology & Environmental-Design (PETE) places students inside real firms during the semester through internships provided through the lab, so the workforce we study is also the workforce we help build.

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Autism · STEM

Models to Minds

AI and immersive technologies that empower autistic and neurodivergent learners through hands-on making, strengthening spatial cognition, creativity, social engagement, and confidence while expanding pathways into STEM education and careers.

Reentry

Reentry Through Design

A STEM and environmental-design curriculum with residents of a female halfway house, building knowledge, goal-setting, and self-efficacy to support successful reentry.

Generative AI, immersive media, and tangible interfaces are not just new equipment for designers; they change what designing is. We study that change scientifically, then accelerate it, from controlled experiments on creativity to designathons that turn ideas into ventures.

Generative AI

AI as Co-Creator

Experiments showing generative AI can genuinely enhance early design work, improving output quality while easing mental load, when it acts as a collaborator rather than a replacement.

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Expertise

Will AI Take Your Job?

A current study testing where human domain expertise still wins during AI-assisted concept design, and what that means for how creative professions should adopt these tools.

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Design Cognition

Thinking with the Hands

A decade of interface research showing tangible, physical interaction carries measurably lighter cognitive load than working through a screen, evidence that the body is part of the creative mind.

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Since 2018

Hackathons & Designathons

Structured accelerators, including global designathons with NASA and international university partners, compressing design thinking into working prototypes in a weekend.

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NSF iCorps

Research to Venture

SITAND, an ergonomic seating concept for older adults, carried from lab research into NSF iCorps customer discovery: proof the pipeline runs all the way to enterprise.

Inspiration

Where Ideas Come From

Foundational work published in Design Studies showing subliminal suggestions can trigger sudden moments of inspiration, a rare experimental window into creative insight itself.

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Culture lives in objects, languages, places, and elders' memories, all of which can fade. We use 3D scanning, immersive storytelling, and AI to help communities preserve them, always on the community's terms: clear permissions, culturally appropriate access, and stewardship aligned with NAGPRA values.

NSF · $1.5M

NAMSAS

Culturally grounded afterschool STEM for Native American middle schoolers through VR, AR, 3D scanning, and 3D printing, in partnership with the Pawnee Nation, Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Otoe-Missouria Tribe.

namsas.net

3D Scanning · NAGPRA

Relics to Realities

Scanning tribal museum collections into lasting, community-governed digital archives and immersive virtual museum experiences, with repatriation-aware documentation.

Holograms · Elders

Elder Stories as Holograms

Elders' spatial memories translated into AI imagery refined through elder feedback and presented as life-size holograms. Accuracy improved with each round, and youth retained measurably more knowledge.

Language Futures

Learning in Cultural Space

A VR teaching lodge for learning Potawatomi, an AR storybook preserving Yoruba, and an AR pop-up book on Taos Pueblo architecture, testing whether culturally grounded environments improve learning.

Resilience · Practice

Rebuilding After Disaster

Roots in practice: post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka with GTZ, and AR interventions that reanimated a dysfunctional public space in historic Kandy without touching its fabric.

Adaptive Reuse · Digital Heritage

Washington School Digital Preservation

High-resolution 3D scanning and digital documentation of the historic Washington School, creating a permanent record to support adaptive reuse, community storytelling, heritage preservation, and future design interventions.

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Somewhere between an AI-embedded hotel room and a crew cabin bound for deep space is every environment people will occupy next. We prototype those environments in XR and test them against the only standard that matters: how humans actually respond.

NASA-Informed

Deep Space Crew Quarters

Standard versus biophilic crew quarters compared in VR with input from NASA engineers, measuring emotion, workload, satisfaction, pupil dilation, and heart rate in an environment no one can visit yet.

AIoT · Hospitality

The Smart Hotel Room

A live AI-enabled guest room showing that intuitive, well-integrated technology lowers guest stress and workload while raising satisfaction, measured with task interactions and biometrics.

One Variable at a Time

Environments as Variables

Studies physical buildings never could run: store color and shopper behavior, hotel hues across cultures, classroom lighting and teacher stress, all with everything else held perfectly still.

Auditory Landmarks

Wayfinding by Ear

Sound alone can guide people through spaces they have never seen, with auditory landmarks producing higher perceived immersion than visual landmarks alone.

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Retail Futures

Virtual Stores

How layout, color, and crowding shape approach behavior and purchase intent, tested in VR retail environments before a single fixture is bought.

Cities After Dark

Urban Lighting & Emotion

Warm versus cool, dim versus bright: how a street's lighting changes whether people feel safe enough to approach or choose to avoid it after dark.