Researcher envisions future in which extended reality revolutionizes everyday life
Dr. Edgar Rojas-Muñoz explores how merging digital and physical worlds can transform work, education and mental health for social good.
A Texas A&M University professor sees a future in which the way people work, learn and support their well-being is transformed through extended reality.
Dr. Edgar Rojas-Muñoz, assistant professor in the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, and his team are researching how these emerging technologies could become seamless interfaces for daily life.
Extended reality — an umbrella term for virtual, augmented and mixed reality — blends the physical and digital worlds. While virtual reality immerses users inside simulated environments, augmented reality overlays virtual elements onto real life, such as social media filters. Mixed reality takes it a step further, allowing people to interact with both real and virtual objects, like placing a virtual plant on a real table that reacts to changes in the environment.
Working alongside six Ph.D. students, Rojas-Muñoz is exploring applications in assistive technologies, workplace safety, mental health and remote education to ensure extended reality can be a tool for social good and accessibility.
One project is a partnership with Frisco ISD in which high school students learn to code and design virtual reality applications for use in their classes. “That creates that circular, self-sustainable approach in which the high school students are actually learning how to code addressing educational needs from their own teachers and classmates,” said Rojas-Muñoz.
The team also studies how augmented reality can support mental health. In a pilot study, a Ph.D. student formed focus groups to brainstorm real-time emotion-regulation tools. Ideas ranged from virtual pets for emotional support to progress bars that mark completed tasks — all integrated into the user’s space without interrupting their work.
“The context we are looking for in mental health is, how do you do that in real time? How do you provide support in situations in which you cannot afford to stop what you’re doing?” Rojas-Muñoz said.
Although the projects are still in the research phase, Rojas-Muñoz is optimistic about bringing them into real-world use to benefit the public.
“We’re at a turning point in which we need to really showcase the positive potential that mixed reality can have in accessibility, in mental health, in health care and in education,” Rojas-Muñoz said. “That’s how you take these technologies out of the labs have them working for the people and not the other way around.”
