Posts

Historic Avondale in VR

/in , /by

Virtual Reality Development for Historic Avondale and Digital Heritage 

Principal Investigator (PI):  Anne Delano Steinert, Co-PI: Ming Tang. ($14,000 allocation to DAAP)
Society and Culture Grant, UC Research Office.  2026. University of Cincinnati. Timeline: 1/13/2026-07/01/2026 


Project Overview

The Historic Avondale Digital Heritage Project aims to create an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) reconstruction of Cincinnati’s historic Avondale neighborhood, focusing on cultural heritage preservation and community engagement. Through a collaborative effort between A&S and DAAP’s XR-Lab, the project will visualize approximately six urban blocks of Avondale as they appeared in a historically significant period in 1950s, enabling users to explore the environment through VR headsets and interact with its digital elements. 

This initiative supports experiential learning, public history dissemination, and digital preservation. The final VR experience will be designed for accessibility on standalone VR headsets (Meta Quest) and optimized for community outreach, classroom education, and museum-style exhibition. 

 

 Scope of Work

The Extended Reality Lab (XR-Lab) will lead the technical development, 3D modeling, and immersive environment creation. 
Specific responsibilities include: 

  • Environment Modeling: Develop a high-fidelity 3D digital model of approximately six blocks of historic Avondale, including building facades, streetscapes, and key landscape features based on historical references. 
  • Visual Assets: Integrate architectural elements, materials, vegetation, street furniture, and atmospheric lighting to accurately represent the period context. 
  • Immersive Interactivity: Configure the scene for full VR immersion, allowing users to navigate and interact using Meta Quest headsets. 
  • Narrative Integration: Collaborate with the A&S team to embed audio narratives, historical commentary, and interpretive storytelling within the VR experience. 
  • Optimization & Testing: Optimize performance for standalone VR headsets, conduct iterative testing, and ensure accessibility and stability for public demonstration. 
  • Deployment: Package and deliver a functional VR build ready for viewing via Meta Quest Browser or as an installable application. 

 Deliverables

  • VR Model of Historic Avondale – A completed, interactive VR environment covering approximately six city blocks. 
  • High-Fidelity Visual Assets – Accurately modeled architecture, landscape, and environmental elements. 
  • Integrated Audio Narratives – Recorded and embedded voiceovers provided by A&S collaborators. 
  • VR-Ready Application – Optimized and deployable version compatible with Meta Quest 3 headsets. 
  • Documentation Package – Summary of technical workflow, file structure, and recommendations for future updates or expansion. 

Figure 1. Coloraization of a historic photo with AI. Reality Capture. By student Edwina Adu Bimpong, Mario Bermejo.

Figure 2. video clips based on historic photo, using AI. 

Figure 3. AI-augmented reconstruction.

Student team: Braxton Xavier Bush, Nicholas R. Lysaght, Logan Aleczander Saylor, Lucas Frank Tereck, Lillian Denise Wick, Mario Bermejo, Edwina Adu Bimpong, Collin Andrew Bradley, Raamprakash Kalaiyarasan, Prize Mathew, and Bozhi Peng. Aayush Kumar as TA. 

ASTRO Award

/in /by

Congratulations to XR-Lab Fellow Aayush Kumar on being awarded the 2026 Armstrong ASTRO Fellowship for the Discovery Program by the University of Cincinnati Office of Research.

 

This fellowship provides $6,000 in support for Aayush Kumar’s project, INARA (Intelligent Navigation and Autonomous Response Agent). The project explores innovative approaches to autonomous navigation through a hybrid framework that integrates reinforcement learning with rule-based control.

AI symposium, Bearcat AI Award

/in , /by

AI & Emerging Technology Symposium, UC Bearcat AI Award,  

Presentation at the UC 2026 AI & Emerging Technology Symposium on 02/18/2026 at UC TUC Center.

AI-Based Spatial Computing with BIM: Performance, Sustainability, and Wayfinding on the UC Campus

This project introduces an AI-enhanced spatial computing framework that integrates building-scale digital twins with intelligent autonomous navigation. Using BIM-derived geometry and utility metadata, the system combines LLM-assisted building-performance analytics with predictive modeling to support sustainable operations across an interactive, campus-scale digital twin environment. In parallel, we present INARA, a ROS 2–based indoor navigation platform that merges BIM-accurate simulation environments with a hybrid deep-reinforcement-learning and classical-control architecture, enabling safe, adaptive mobile-robot navigation within UC facilities.

Together, these systems advance AI-driven spatial computing by unifying building analytics, embodied intelligence, and digital–physical interoperability—laying the foundation for next-generation smart-building management and autonomous robotic applications.

Read more

THRED

/in , /by

Technology for Health, Resilience, Equity , and Decision-Making 

Team: A&S: Kelly Merrill, Lauren Forbes, Briana Simms, Paris Wheeler, Diego Cuadros, DAAP: Ming Tang

Funding: Center for Clinical & Translational Science & Training. CCTST. Pilot Grant. $50,000. PI. Merrill, Forbes,  Co-I. Tang, Cuadros, Simms, Wheeler. 2026. University of Cincinnati.

Project Aims: 

Aim 1: Co-design a set of digital data governance policies that reflect Black community preferences, concerns, and expectations around the use of their digital health data.  

Aim 2: Assess the utility of digital twin technology (3D city modeling with VR) for community advocacy and population health-related objectives. 

Aim 3: Co-design and develop a community-driven, population health intervention and participatory planning tool. 

Ming Tang’s involvement in the human-centered digital twin can be traced back to his work at the MSU MIND Lab roughly two decades ago, and the THRED project builds directly on that foundation. There is also a clear conceptual link to HomeNetToo project then, where multiple interfaces—a standard web interface, a spatial interface, and an interpersonal interface—were developed to examine how different modes of interaction influence knowledge acquisition across varying cognitive styles. That early work established an important premise: the design of an interface fundamentally shapes how users interpret, understand, and engage with information.

THRED extends this line of inquiry beyond controlled experimental settings into a real-world, system-scale platform by integrating digital twins, and data-driven decision environments. Rather than comparing interfaces in isolation, it synthesizes them—bringing together spatial (3D environments), informational (data visualization and dashboards), and social (community and stakeholder engagement) interfaces into a unified ecosystem. In this sense, THRED represents a shift from experimental interaction design toward an applied, human-centered digital twin framework. It maintains continuity with earlier immersive technology research while significantly expanding its scope, enabling new forms of collective understanding, decision-making, and behavioral insight at urban and societal scales.

Read more

Therapeutic Crisis Intervention Simulation, Phase 3

/in , , /by

We are excited to announce the launch of Phase 3 of the VR-Based Employee Safety Training: Therapeutic Crisis Intervention Simulation project, building on the success of the previous two phases. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together the Immersive Learning Lab and the Employee Safety Learning Lab at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), in partnership with the Extended Reality Lab (XR-Lab) at the University of Cincinnati. 

This phase will focus on developing an advanced virtual hospital environment populated with digital patients to simulate a variety of real-world Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) scenarios. The digital twins encompass both the hospital setting and patient avatars. The project aims to design immersive training modules, capture user performance data, and conduct a rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of VR-based training in enhancing employee safety and crisis response capabilities

Principal Investigator: Ming Tang. Funding Amount: $38,422. Project Period: April 1, 2025 – December 1, 2026

CCHMC Collaborators: Dr. Nancy Daraiseh, Dr. Maurizio Macaluso, Dr. Aaron Vaughn.

Research Domains: Virtual Reality, Safety Training, Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, Mental Health, Digital Twins, Digital Humans, Human Behavior Simulation.

We look forward to continuing this impactful work and advancing the role of immersive technologies in healthcare education and safety training

Concept of Digital Twin: Digital Patient + Digital Hospital.

publicaiton
Daraiseh, N. M., Tang, M., Macaluso, M., Aeschbury, M., Bachtel, A., Nikolaenko, M., … Vaughn, A. (2025). Virtual Reality Training to De-escalate Patient Aggressive Behavior: A Pilot Study. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2576635