How Purdue University is enhancing education with extended reality
The Purdue University Envision Center is a data visualization research and development laboratory nested within the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing in Purdue IT. The Envision Center was established in 2004 and has more than two decades of experience assisting university faculty and industry partners with their multimedia and virtual simulation needs.
Extended reality (XR) technologies are transforming how students learn and how researchers collaborate. Purdue University's Envision Center leads this innovation with CollabXR, an open-source, multi-user platform that provides immersive mixed reality experiences to connect physical and digital learning.
Over 100 students across multiple disciplines have already experienced this revolutionary approach to education in the past year. Read on to learn how CollabXR:
- Significantly enhances student-reported comprehension of complex subject matters.
- Improves cross-research and in-classroom collaboration.
- Enables instructors to extend sessions from 20 minutes to 45+ minutes due to reduced motion sickness.
- Allow experts to make novel observations within minutes of exploring data in the application.
The challenge: Visualizing complex data effectively
Dr. Danny Milisavljevic, a physics and astronomy faculty member at Purdue, needed an effective way to explore and share complex stellar supernova remnant data. Traditional methods like scientific data visualization platforms, animated videos, and anaglyph glasses had significant limitations. He required a platform that could facilitate exploration, communication, and collaboration with peers and students beyond standard scientific visualization tools. This led to Dr. Milisavljevic partnering with the Envision Center in 2018 to begin development of what would become CollabXR.
The solution: Unity powers CollabXR
The Purdue Envision Center had already adopted Unity as the go-to tool for content creation. When evaluating CollabXR's development, Unity proved to be a versatile option for several key reasons:
Extendibility and device support: Unity's broad compatibility across various XR devices and ability to easily adapt the CollabXR platform allowed Purdue to quickly prototype and expand the solution while accommodating pivots and scope changes. The platform currently supports Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro headsets.
Shaders and visual effects: Since CollabXR centers on visualization, the team performs extensive shader work. Unity Shader Graph and VFX Graph enabled rapid prototyping, faster iterations, and easier finalization of their visualizations.
Asset Bundles: With Asset Bundles, users can easily bundle and deliver content directly to the headsets.
Extensive XR support: Unity’s array of cross-platform tools for XR development, including the XR Interaction Toolkit and various third-party multiplayer packages, helped the team iterate quickly while building their XR prototypes.
A new era of education
Developed with Dr. Miliasvljevic and using Unity Industry, CollabXR focuses on three key areas:
1. Scientific visualization: The team wanted one platform supporting computed and measured complex data in a variety of formats like pointclouds, volumes, isosurfaces, and flowfields.
2. Passthrough AR support: Leveraging passthrough cameras to overlay virtual content onto the real world maintains essential classroom elements, allowing students to interact naturally while engaging with virtual materials. This makes it easier to contextualize virtual content in the real world. For example: Users can overlay virtual radiation fields over a real radiopharmaceutical lab or slice through a tomography scan while meeting in a live hospital environment.
3. Seamless collaboration: Designed for co-present research and instruction, facilitating intuitive communication through real peer interaction while reducing motion sickness compared to pure VR experiences.
CollabXR has become a standard part of Dr. Danny Milisavljevic’s course execution and syllabus, fundamentally changing how he teaches and conducts research. Since launching the pilot program in Spring 2025, CollabXR has enhanced courses across disciplines including Aeronautics, Nursing, Mechanical Engineering, Earth Sciences, and more.
Breakthrough results: See how CollabXR makes a difference
CollabXR delivers tangible results. During its pilot program, six university professors with curricula ranging from Nursing to Liberal Arts tested CollabXR in their classrooms. Once the pilot program was complete, a survey was answered by over 50 participating students.
Here are the results:
- 84% strongly agreed CollabXR significantly enhances comprehension and communication of subject matter over alternative presentation methods in the classroom, with the remaining 16% still agreeing somewhat.
- Significant decrease in motion sickness with AR integration, enabling longer, more effective class sessions (increasing from 20 minutes to 45+ minutes).
- Experts make novel observations and gain new intuition within minutes of exploring data in the application.
- Accelerated learning by overcoming data transformation hurdles through visualization.
- Improved communication and collaboration between professors and students.
The pilot program was overwhelmingly successful, with participants reporting positive experiences and strong desire for continued engagement with CollabXR throughout their studies.
Forward looking: The future of CollabXR
Following the successful pilot program, Purdue plans to expand and improve CollabXR. The platform will soon be made open source to foster community and accessibility across other institutions. The team has deployed to Apple Vision Pro and plans to expand support to mobile and desktop AR.
CollabXR represents more than new technology—it's a shift toward more engaging, effective education and research. The platform's success demonstrates XR's potential in education. As more institutions adopt this technology, collaborative virtual learning will play a major role in the future of teaching and learning.
