Boise State University Joins Oculus University Program

There’s exciting news coming out of the Computer Science Department over at Boise State University. The university has been selected to be part of the Oculus NextGen Research University Program! Oculus’s NexGen program brings Unity workshops plus hardware from Samsung, AMD and Oculus to universities allowing them to expand their content creation programs. NexGen was launched in 2017 primarily focusing on universities who’s programming had gaming applications. Boise State University was asked to submit an application for this round of participants and has been accepted as part of the next group. In this second round of new universities, the program is expanding the scope to include applications that are outside of gaming such as architecture or training among others.

The Computer Graphics and Visualization Lab at BSU will be getting ten Oculus Rift’s, educational support from Oculus, participation in the Facebook stream and attendance at the Oculus NextGen Workshop this spring. The requirements for participating universities are twofold. Firstly, they need to update the group Facebook page on what they’re doing with the program. Secondly, they’re required to attend the NextGen conference in April to share ideas with other universities.

When I spoke with Dr. Cutchin, who oversees the lab, he said they will be using the Rift’s in their VIP-VR course this semester for architectural, immersive experiments, art and any other ways the students are looking to leverage it.

Congratulations to Dr. Cutchin and Boise State University for this unique opportunity with Oculus. If you’d like to learn more or get in touch with them about the program you can reach out to Dr. Cutchin at stevencutchin(at)boisestate.edu .  The VIP-VR program is looking for interested creative programmers, artists, and designers to help create experimental and innovative virtual reality experiences so please reach out if you have an idea!