Students wearing VR headsets with a 3D filter
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By Nikki Babri

As UC Irvine students don virtual reality headsets, they are instantly transported – walking barefoot through border crossing simulations, exploring virtual K-pop concert venues and reconstructing ancient sites lost to history.

At UCI’s School of Humanities, the new course “Virtualizing Cultures (Cultures 3.0)” merges digital technology with cultural studies. While students develop technical skills, the course remains grounded in fundamental humanities questions, using extended reality (XR) technologies to examine how cultures manifest and evolve in virtual spaces. Through hands-on virtual tours and interactive simulations, students explore cultural representation and identity formation beyond the typical boundaries of the classroom.

Reimagining cultural education

Headshot of Professor Jung-Hsien Lin

“Virtual reality (VR) offers a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between classroom learning and lived experiences of diverse cultural communities,” explains Jung-Hsien Lin, director of the VR Lab for Global Languages & Cultures and lecturer. Drawing from her work integrating virtual and mixed reality technologies in the classroom, which earned her UCI’s Teaching Innovation Excellence award in 2024, Lin envisioned a course where digital spaces themselves become subjects of cultural study.

“This course represents a culmination of these efforts, enabling students to engage in embodied, virtual exploration of global cultures in ways that traditional methods cannot achieve,” Lin shares. While technology often raises concerns about diminishing human connection, virtual environments highlight the many invisible ways that cultural practices shape our daily lives. Lin adds, “VR provides critical distance yet full immersion, allowing students to step back and reflect on culture as a construct while simultaneously experiencing it in a profound and sensory way.”

UCI’s Office of Data and Information Technology (ODIT) partnered with Lin to provide VR headsets for each student. This institutional support has ensured equitable access to this technology and enabled all students, regardless of socioeconomic background, to fully engage in immersive learning experiences. To maximize accessibility, Lin offers flexible platform options – headsets, laptops and phones – and provides regular workshops and one-on-one support. 

ODIT-sponsored VR headsets for UCI students
ODIT-sponsored VR headsets for UCI students

“Extended reality is reshaping how we teach, learn and even how we work,” says Tom Andriola, UCI’s Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Data and Chief Digital Officer. “By integrating XR into humanities education, we’re showing how immersive technologies can deepen cultural understanding and prepare students for today’s digital world.” 

Embodied learning in virtual spaces

The course transforms traditional cultural studies through active engagement and immersive technology. Rather than simply reading about cultural sites or writing theoretical essays, students embody experiences, share vulnerable personal stories and build meaningful connections with classmates through their avatars. 

Headshot of Grace Eberhart

For students like Grace Eberhart, a global cultures major, the virtual environment creates unique opportunities to draw on their own backgrounds and share personal narratives. During one presentation, Eberhart transported her classmates to Gyeongbokgung Palace in South Korea to share her adoption story using a 3D display of a hanbok, a traditional Korean dress. Adopted from South Korea as an infant, Eberhart reunited with her foster parents at age 14, where they shared memories including a photo of her wearing a hanbok for her 100th day celebration.

“During the trip, I received a customized and tailored pink and purple hanbok. Now, I have the two hanboks as one of many artifacts of my identity and my story. And to share this with my class in VR was a new and cool experience,” she explains.

Fostering empathy

Headshot of Lilian Pham

Many students found that VR experiences created deeper emotional connections than traditional learning methods. Recent graduate Lilian Pham ‘24 (B.A., anthropology) experienced this firsthand through “Notes on Blindness,” a VR simulation of losing sight. “Having an interactive experience helped me better understand what being blind really means. The environment slowly got more eerie, which began to scare me,” Pham says, noting that her emotional response to the dark room reflected just how deeply immersed she had become in the virtual space.

Engagement is enhanced by designing gamification into the course. “Students don't just read or listen; they move, explore and interact,” says Lin. They navigate virtual spaces as if playing a video game, discovering cultural artifacts, taking virtual selfies and unlocking new environments as they progress. Remaining present and active is paramount – if they don’t move, they are stuck.

Guest speakers throughout the quarter revealed VR’s diverse applications, from amplifying marginalized voices to advancing humanistic projects. Through various simulations, students explored a virtual Costa Rican village where local artists’ work was displayed alongside their recorded stories, and experienced “Carne Y Arena,” which immersed them in border-crossing experiences through physical elements like sand under their feet and wind from simulated helicopter flyovers.

VR student avatar
Student avatar from Lin's fall 2024 course

Real-world applications

Through virtual preservation techniques, students can examine and interact with historical artifacts that would be too delicate for physical handling, ensuring these items remain accessible for future study. These virtual environments double as living archives, where cultural practices and artifacts can be experienced even as their physical counterparts become inaccessible.

The virtual setting also upends typical classroom dynamics. Students present their work in diverse environments – from ancient amphitheaters and dinosaur islands to the UCI campus itself – complete with ambient features like birdsong that enhance sensory immersion. Presenting through personalized avatars rather than in person reduces anxiety, allowing students to focus fully on their content while immersed in the virtual world.

Students progress from individual digital ethnography projects exploring temporal dimensions of culture to increasingly complex collaborative work. By the end of the quarter, they create diverse virtual spaces that demonstrate VR’s potential to address real-world challenges and strengthen community bonds.

Screenshot of VentaX VR K-pop room
Screenshot of Eberhart's final project displaying a virtual K-pop concert platform

These spaces range from safe havens addressing campus food insecurity – complete with hammocks, meditation gardens and community kitchens – to immersive courtroom experiences that let users witness pivotal moments in women’s legal history. Eberhart, initially skeptical of VR, discovered its potential to foster community connections through her final project with VentaX, a virtual K-pop concert platform that makes cultural experiences more accessible and inclusive through features like dance mimicry and live song requests. 

Each project emphasizes critical cultural analysis and ethical implications, using technology to deepen rather than replace traditional humanistic inquiry into how cultures form and evolve. Students further reflected how VR could help overcome the isolation of remote learning, suggesting broader applications for distance education and virtual community building.

As VR technology advances, Lin envisions expanding the course’s scope to include more sophisticated interactive features and community partnerships. “My hope is that VR-based teaching methods become more widely adopted across the humanities,” she shares. “By embedding VR into the humanities, we can continue to push the boundaries of how culture is studied, understood and experienced.”

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