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Escape rooms are fun, but they could also help make VR and AR effective tools for education and AI, research finds
Virtual and augmented reality learning is more popular than ever, but it still has flaws. Northeastern researchers turned to escape rooms to learn how AI could help students learn better using immersive technology.
Eileen McGivney and Tommy Zhu attend CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan
Eileen McGivney awarded an inaugural mini-grant from the Center for Transformative Media
Eileen McGivney, “Participatory Design of Educational Virtual Reality”
As VR becomes more affordable and accessible, many have seen its potential for education (Pimentel et al., 2022). However, few initiatives from the technology industry go beyond simple gimmicks, and there is a dearth of educational content that educators can integrate into their curricula. For example, when launching their $150 million immersive learning initiative, Meta asked “what if you could learn anything, just by bringing it closer?” (Facebook, 2021), only highlighting what the technology can do without substantive thought to pedagogy or meaningful learning goals.
For VR to live up to its transformative potential in education, it will take a more thoughtful and grassroots design process to leverage the technology’s affordances to address challenges teachers and learners face in the classroom. This project addresses this need by engaging teachers in a participatory design process for developing a STEM education VR application.
The ultimate goal of this project is to build a VR field trip that can be easily used in classrooms for a transformative impact in STEM education. Following this participatory design process, we will conduct user testing with students, apply for larger grants to further the VR development, and ultimately study the application’s efficacy in classrooms.
XR Speaker Series Recordings
This is a recording of the invited XR Speakers sessions hosted across Northeastern University’s network of campuses by the College of Arts, Media and Design in the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters. It was organized and hosted online by professors Eileen McGivney (Boston campus), Nathalie Mathe (Oakland campus), Mirjana Prpa (Vancouver campus), Sin Joel-Edgar (London campus) with support from PhD student Monica Storss.
Spatial Computing Tech Gives Students Real-World Experience in Virtual Environments
Eileen McGivney, an assistant professor at Northeastern, has studied VR for education among K–12 students and prison populations, often leaning on commercially available headsets such as the Quest 2. Although the commercial sector has pursued highly scalable applications, including social VR and virtual meetings, McGivney sees more utility in niche use cases, such as virtual field trips or replicating hands-on medical education. Because academic institutions don’t face pressure to generate profits, she says, they are uniquely positioned to both develop and validate these sorts of applications.
Eileen McGivney featured on The Versatilist Podcast
A talk with Dr. Eileen McGivney about her work “Complexity of Agency in VR Learning Environments: Exploring Associations with Interactivity, Learning Outcomes, and Affect.”