At the University of California, Santa Cruz, ShapesXR supports Creative Design in Virtual Reality, an undergraduate course open to multidisciplinary students. By enabling VR-native prototyping without programming, ShapesXR keeps the focus on creative, human-centered design and collaboration. Students use it to build interactive spaces and complete VR applications within a single academic quarter, while educators benefit from an accessible tool that supports experiential learning and transferable design skills.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a public R1 university located in Santa Cruz, California and part of the University of California system. Within its School of Engineering, UCSC offers a course titled Creative Design in Virtual Reality, which is open to any undergraduate student without prerequisite knowledge or cost. As far as the teaching team’s research has shown, this is the only course of its kind in the UC system without a long prerequisite chain and explicitly open to multidisciplinary students.
It is part of UCSC’s Lead By Design program, which focuses on creating more accessible and experiential Design-Build curricula for early-career students. In this context, the class was designed to address burnout, gatekeeping, and monotony associated with large classrooms by combining active learning with emerging technology, specifically virtual reality.
The course positions Creative Design of VR applications as a way for early-career undergraduates to explore the engineering design cycle in a collaborative and experiential learning environment. The focus is on creative and human-centred software development rather than a purely technical lens, supporting skills such as critical thinking, adaptability, teamwork, and iterative problem solving that are transferable to any career.
ShapesXR was selected because it allows students to design spaces in virtual reality without relying on programming skills. This enabled the class to remain focused on creative design, modelling, and user experience, while maintaining a multidisciplinary and collaborative environment. Using ShapesXR, all students were able to create a functional VR application prototype within a ten-week course.
The tool was introduced through built-in tutorials that students followed at their own pace during class, allowing them to begin creating within a single class period.
ShapesXR was used across several core assignments, including designing an interactive dream balcony, creating gallery showrooms to curate artwork built in Blender, collaboratively imitating scenes from existing games, and developing a final VR application with defined requirements for lighting, UI, scenes, and assets. Collaboration features played a central role, with students working together in VR to co-create, tour, and critique each other’s work. One notable project involved stitching together individual student gallery spaces into a shared immersive art gallery, allowing learners to freely explore and experience each other’s installations in VR.
Accessibility was also a key factor. ShapesXR’s browser-based functionality allowed students to work outside of VR when needed, supporting those who were more comfortable working on desktop or who experienced discomfort during extended VR sessions.
“ShapesXR allowed us to build and teach a class around VR design, enabling students to create and prototype their application ideas without any prior exposure.” — Deniz Yaralioglu, Student Instructor
ShapesXR enabled the course itself by providing a prototyping tool that is accessible to early learners with no prior VR or programming experience. For students, it made VR app prototyping achievable within a single academic quarter, supporting learning outcomes such as safe headset use, UX analysis in VR, 3D modeling, storyboarding, prototyping, peer testing, and iterative design. The ability to see ideas built out around them in VR transformed abstract concepts into tangible experiences and encouraged active creation rather than passive consumption.
For educators, ShapesXR offered a low learning curve with a high ceiling, making it possible to teach VR app design in a hands-on and inclusive way. The ability to import external assets from tools like Blender allowed the curriculum to connect creative modelling with immersive prototyping, reinforcing learning across disciplines. While students frequently reached the limits of standalone devices, working through these constraints became part of the learning process, reinforcing optimization, adaptability, and problem solving.
Overall, ShapesXR proved to be a strong fit for UCSC’s Creative Design in Virtual Reality course. It supported accessible, collaborative, and experiential learning, enabling multidisciplinary students to engage meaningfully with VR design and empowering educators to deliver inclusive, project-based instruction in an emerging field.
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