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Bellevue College created an XR Lab to explore equitable XR applications in education and leveraged ShapesXR to revolutionize teaching and collaboration. With projects ranging from virtual anatomy galleries to real-time spatial collaborations between campuses, students and faculty members are empowered to create immersive 3D experiences across disciplines, showcasing the potential of XR in education.
Bellevue College, located in Bellevue, Washington, serves about 29,000–30,000 students annually with 900–1,000 faculty members. Its mission focuses on student success and lifelong learning and offers diverse programs, including associate, bachelor's degrees, and professional certificates, emphasizing healthcare, technology, business, and the arts.
The XR Lab was created in 2018 and is now equipped with state-of-the-art hardware with a mission to explore the equitable applications of XR technologies for teaching and learning.
XR Lab creators Bruce Wolcott and James Riggall met while team teaching a hybrid interactive entertainment course for the University of Tasmania at the Human Interface Technology Lab there in 2010-2012. The HITLab was dedicated to early XR research and teaching. Riggall later visited Bellevue College on a Fulbright Scholarship, where he collaborated with Wolcott in launching the XR Lab located in the library for cross-disciplinary access. In 2023, the XR Lab received a $780K National Science Foundation grant to 1) further develop XR technology courses and 2) to expand an existing network of academic institutions making use of spatial computing technologies, called the NW XR EDU Network.
We were experimenting with a variety of VR social world-building apps such as Spatial, Mozilla Hubs, Frame, Virbela, and RecRoom. All of these support multiple delivery platforms ranging from smartphones to headsets. All of them have relative benefits and drawbacks but. ShapesXR is really the first XR application that makes it easy to build virtual spaces collaboratively using controllers and headsets. The UX solutions to positioning, coloring, scaling, gridding, and importing media are really well thought out. I also like the fact that avatar presenters can be integrated into virtual spaces.
“We’re discovering that ShapesXR can bring learning to life by allowing students to build and explore 3D worlds together in VR, making complex subjects—from microbiology to interior design — tangible and fun." - Bruce Wolcott, Faculty Lead, Bellevue College XR Lab; Drew Stone, Bellevue College XR Lab Coordinator
Over the past few months, we have worked on several projects that showcase the power of ShapesXR as an accessible presentation tool for teachers and students. We wanted students to understand the advantages of 3D environments to communicate and build dimensional ideas and get them comfortable using spatial environment tools and workflows for multi-user collaborations. We were able to create a digital twin of our Lab space with lidar to get accurate real-world dimensions for several of our projects and import the space in ShapesXR as a 3D model. This allowed us to have a reference space we could use to populate with other 3D assets created with standard 3D editing softwares like Blender or by using a variety of Generative AI 3D model building tools. This allowed the students to create spatial presentations that were not just static displays but took advantage of the scene system built in ShapesXR to build a narrative to explain their process. A tangible example is the work of Anatomy professor Reza Forough. As part of the standard curriculum his students hand crafted 3D models of microorganisms and human anatomy parts. After capturing their creations as 3D models the students were able to create a virtual gallery in mixed reality to preserve their work and share it with peers and future students.
Micro gallery video walkthrough. Anatomy professor Reza Forough has his student hand build 3D models of microorganisms.
Live Demo between Seattle and Bogota. Exploring the use of AI generative tools as well as an anatomy tour of student projects.
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Students and faculty are awed by seeing large-scale objects floating within a room using augmented reality. The 3D objects are so clear and detailed, I think they surprise people. The potential of setting up lectures using the built-in recordable avatar feature has also been interesting to several other faculties. This resonates with the fact that ShapesXR is inherently discipline-agnostic and can be used for any number of different teaching scenarios: interior design, nursing, molecular biology, computer science, language learning, art, architecture, engineering, astronomy, etc.
We had a live meeting with one of our remote XR Lab employees between Bellevue College and Bogota, Columbia. We collaborated and built environments together in real-time while in ShapesXR. Up to a few years ago this sounded like science fiction but now we’re able to actually do it. As we’re building a network of institutions using XR, we see spatial collaboration as a great way for participants to connect and work together in meaningful ways.
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