Shanna Finnigan

It’s a Wednesday in September. I’m in my Marine Biology lecture. I open my pencil bag for a freshly sharpened pencil, and reach down into my bag for a lined piece of paper. But before I can fish out a sheet from my binder, my professor claps her hands at the front of the classroom, signaling for us to look up and give her our attention.  “Today, we’re doing something a … [Read more...] about The Benefits of Immersive Education

I always think of Los Angeles in the present, if that makes sense. As if the Los Angeles that I know is the only Los Angeles that ever was or will be. But, that’s not true. It’s often easy to forget that the very ground beneath our feet has been around long before me. This soil has been passed from generation to generation, changing a bit with each pocket of passed time. My … [Read more...] about Exploring Los Angeles Through XR

Monocular Cues are visual cues used for depth perception that are dependent on one eye. Several different types of monocular cues help us to estimate the distance of objects: interposition, motion parallax, relative size and clarity, texture gradient, linear perspective, and light and shadow. In this blog, I’ve gone through and described each monocular cue in detail, which are … [Read more...] about Monocular Visual Cues and VR

There has long been a line drawn between STEM and the arts. Between left-brain and right-brain, logic and creativity. The engineer thinks in numbers and mathematical relationships while the artist thinks in colors, shapes, and feelings. I’ve always been taught that when it came to my career, I’d have to choose between the two. However, I find myself crossing this line on a … [Read more...] about Why I Write on XR

There are several main areas that scent-focused XR is tasked with addressing, the first of which being position tracking. In order to trigger appropriate smells at times that correspond with the storytelling in a virtual experience, it is important that the system is able to track where a user is in this digital environment, so that as they come upon scent-triggering elements, … [Read more...] about Continuation of Olfactory VR: A Historical Perspective