Extended reality theater in Huang Complex to host motion capture technology – The Daily Barometer
Extended reality theater in Huang Complex to host motion capture technology – The Daily Barometer
Publish Date: 2026-06-08 15:05:00
Source Domain: dailybaro.orangemedianetwork.com
In December, Oregon State University’s $200 million Jen-Hsun Haung and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex is set to open its doors.
While many have heard of the NVIDIA supercomputer, the other labs inside are more of a mystery to the public.
The new building is set to feature many labs, including one for ocean and clean water research as well as a “cyberphysical playground” for robotics testing.
However, one of the most versatile spaces to be included in the new complex is the extended reality theater, which is set to open in the spring.
It plans to allow members of the OSU community to visualize data in an immersive environment.
“How do we take all of the work we’ve done from research, training and supercomputing and crunch that down to turn (the data) into a human experience?” said Marc Cholewczynski, associate director of academic technologies.
While not a theater in the traditional sense, lacking things like seats or a popcorn machine, the extended reality theater plans to provide a way for researchers and the public to experience data through spatial audio, visualization, motion capture and artificial intelligence, according to Cholewcyzinski.
The theater will be equipped with a 16-foot by 32-foot LED wall and a truss system that will have cameras, microphones, speakers and motion capture cameras.
OSU leaders toured multiple extended reality and virtual production centers at other universities like Arizona State University to come up with their design.
Cholewczynski said that from these experiences, they decided that they wanted to streamline and automate much of the management of the theater.
Cholewczynski and his team decided to create a localized AI agent for the theater that he calls Bernice. The plan is that Bernice will be able to communicate via voice and text to help users without “advanced technical expertise” to render data.
Bernice will also be able to control the mechanical aspects…
