A Cavalier Daily article, “Illustrating infectious diseases in 3D,” highlights Library Information Visualization Specialist Arin Bennett‘s contribution to a grant-funded project to create a virtual reality program for instructing UVA students about complex biological processes.

The $99,945 grant from the Jefferson Trust will fund a proposal by Bennett and project director Jennifer Guler to use virtual reality to implement an internship program within University classrooms—Guler is an assistant professor in the biology department and teaches infectious disease at the University.

When the project is completed, there will be two public VR headsets in the Robertson Media Center on the third floor of Clemons Library. “We are building all this in Unity 3D, which is a game engine,” Bennett said. The open source project will be available to the public and feature a variety of programs to use with the headsets. According to Bennett, the programs can be exported “out to Windows to Mac to iPhone, Android, PlayStation and VR. So the content will be used and reused.”

Read more about the project in “Illustrating infectious diseases in 3D” (Cavalier Daily 11/29/2019)