The Indiana University Kinetic Immersion and Extended Reality Lab is a technological creatorspace focused on student and faculty research, virtual environments and immersive experiences. Staff began to use the lab over the summer and it is scheduled to be fully complete by April 2027.
Located within the Radio-Television Building, the KIX Lab is home to a motion capture system, high-density loudspeakers and “The Wall.”
“The Wall” is an immersive soundstage made up of high-resolution LED panels. The screens of “The Wall" cover the floor, the side of the room and the ceiling, so people can walk through video and audio environments.
“It's like a green screen on steroids,” KIX Lab Director Ivica Ico Bukvic said.
Bukvic said Media School Dean David Tolchinsky came up with the idea for the KIX Lab three years ago in the hopes of providing IU faculty and students with access to the same technology used in research and audio-visual industries.
The lab is focused on interdisciplinary collaboration, opening the facility to seven different schools across campus and University Information Technology Services.
“I’d love to see students from different schools and different specialties coming together and to create things in the lab, whether it’s for class projects or research purposes,” Robbie Frank, lab engineer, said.
As a lab engineer, Frank helps to operate the cameras, get content displayed on the wall and create 3D virtual environments.
While the lab isn’t officially open yet, it is already being used for projects. The lab crew is working to reach its goal of opening up to more students and the community by April 2027.
A grant application for students to propose projects for the spring that will use different aspects of the KIX Lab is open until Nov. 2. The lab will also be used in higher-level Media School courses open to students in spring 2027, such as Building Immersive Experiences and XR in Nature and BioArt.
“We're trying to make sure that we keep our doors open and accessible to all,” Bukvic said.
The stage has already been used for research through mini-grant programs. This past summer, Bukvic and School of Optometry professor Shirin Hassan worked on a project that studied how neighborhoods can be better designed for visually impaired people.
Bukvic and Hassan’s team created a realistic, virtual neighborhood environment, including a sidewalk, featuring simulated unevenness, pedestrians and puddles. The lab allowed for researchers to study the movement of individuals through this environment in an adaptable, safe setting.
“Here they are in a safe space because they are just walking over a flat-surface screen, and so we could then study and figure out how can we make safer sidewalks for visually impaired?” Bukvic said. “So that's where we delve into that study and advancement of the human condition side of things.”
The high-density loud speakers also work with “The Wall” during research and creative projects. They project a fully immersive sound system that can place noises precisely in specific points and times, allowing complex sound environments to be created and assisting in research.
“The lab's high-density loud speakers really attracted me and (the lab) is really interesting because we have an interdisciplinary community,” Yushan Xu, a first year Ph.D. student and a research assistant in the KIX Lab.
The motion capture system is another key piece of technology within the KIX Lab. The system has many cameras mounted together that track passive and active movements to study human behavior in the created spaces.
“When we finally stage something truly profound and exciting, and we bring audiences in there and students and faculty, I'm just excited to see what comes out of it,” Bukvic said.
The lab hosts weekly KIX Mix events, which are 9 a.m. every Friday in Radio-TV Studio 6. The events feature guest talks, community socials and donuts and coffee and are followed by a 10 a.m. lab tour, which requires advance sign up.
