Urgent Notice
Save the IU Indianapolis VR Lab!
Overview
The IU Indianapolis VR Lab provides a crucial service to both IUI students and faculty. Using only a handful of headsets, the VR Lab is able to provide VR-augmented learning and development opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible to those who can't afford it. Multiple organizations at IUI are directly involved with the VR Lab, including the Center for Teaching & Learning, the Idea Garden, and the Speaker's Lab. All of this is to say, the VR Lab is a very important part of the IU ecosystem.
In early May 2025, Governor Mike Braun signed HEA 1001 into law. In addition to making Braun the sole decider on who is able to serve on IU's Board of Trustees, this bill reallocated spending for many state services. A part of this new bill is a massive bunch of budget cuts. The VR Lab at IUI is very likely to be caught in the crossfire of these cuts and closed entirely.
Enter Save IUI VR Lab, an effort to plead for funding to be allocated to the VR Lab. Our goal, as a group, is to secure funding for the VR Lab so that it may stay open. We intend to do this by informing five parties of the VR Lab's importance and why it must be preserved:
- IUI Chancellor Landa Ramchand (chancllr@iu.edu)
- IU's Board of Trustees (bdotiu.edu)
- IU President Pamela Whitten (iupres@iu.edu)
- Indiana's House of Representatives
- Governor Mike Braun
What can I do?
There are a few avenues of action you can take, depending on your level of involvement with IUI.
- No matter who you are:
- Sign our change.org petition.
- Email us saying how important VR technology is to you, or how it could benefit education.
- If you're an IUI student or faculty member:
- Email us testimonials of the positive expiences you've had involving the VR Lab.
- If you're associated with the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, you can email us about what VR technology does for your industry.
- Email the Board of Trustees, president Pamela Whitten, and chancellor Latha Ramchand requesting the University Library, the VR Lab's parent organization, be granted sufficient funding.
No matter what you're able to do, please remember that time is of the essence! The earlier we make our voices heard, the better. Also, make sure to be polite to everyone on the list of people we're trying to reach. While not all of them care deeply about education (although most do), we won't get anywhere with this by being rude. The new budget will be handed down anywhere from May 15th to June 31st. October is the make or break time, when the VR Lab is either shut down or kept open. Still, we can't make a difference by waiting for the cut to happen, only by acting now.
You can find our petition at https://chng.it/ZxxPyNndwh, and you can email us at saveiuivrlab@gmail.com.
Trustee Email Format
Below is a format for a letter to send to IU's Board of Trustees and President Pamela Whitten. It outlines what VR is used for and how good it can be for students and faculty. Before sending your email, make sure to CC IU President Pamela Whitten and IUI Chancellor Latha Ramchand.
W. Quinn Buckner and the rest of the IU board of trustees, President Pamela Whitten, and Chancellor Latha Ramchad,
Recently, I was made aware of sweeping budget cuts that would be made to IU, particularly to its Indianapolis campus. While I am concerned about budget cuts to anything in IU's ecosystem, I find myself particularly concerned with the budget cuts to the University Library and its Virtual Reality Lab. Should these sweeping budget cuts go into effect, the UL will likely will likely close this lab. I would like to tell you how important the lab is and why I believe funding should be maintained.
Virtual Reality is a welcome disruption to the limitations being faced by people in multiple different disciplines. While many industries use VR technology, I intend to go over four. First is the medical field. Immersive VR applications are far more intuitive to explore the anatomy than a flat image. There are many educational applications that act effectively as an interactive map of the human body and its systems. As well, medical training can be practiced in VR. A large part of medical treatment is being able to work with patients. There are many mainstream programs, such as Body Swaps, meant to simulate working with a patient. These programs intend to teach patience and level-headedness under pressure. Outside of talking to patients, there are applications meant to help teach public speaking skills. One of these applications is called VirtualSpeech. IUI's Speaker's Lab and several of its communication professors use VirtualSpeech to simulate public speaking and in-person interviews through the immersive VR program. This program simulates crowds and breaks down a speech's performance to provide a user with metrics on how they performed. Another category is history, in which VR has many applications. Using VR to immerse oneself in a historical place and time, allowing a user to explore and feel as if they are present in that moment and space, is an excellent example of "learn by doing" in concert with the Constructivist Theory of Education. These VR experiences give students hands-on virtual experiences, which allows them to assign their own meaning and have agency in their education. Finally, I would like to talk about interior design and architecture. Through this immersive visual technology, the ability to manipulate three-dimensional design creates a higher fidelity prototype than flat pictures or sketches. These four fields that are augmented by VR are only a fraction of what the technology has to offer. There is very much a place for VR in education, especially in an institution with as many specializations as IU.
Just within IU's ecosystem, the VR Lab is still very important. It has a direct partnership with the Center for Teaching & Learning through the XR Initiative Grant. The VR Lab Coordinator sits on the grant funding committee, as well as works with faculty to implement the technology in the classroom. The Idea Garden and the VR Lab have been working closely together to partner on the Student Success District project, and are both third spaces where students can attend class, study, design and interate, and relax. The lab's space can be reserved any time during operating hours, at which time they have sole rights to use the space. This is often, although not exclusively, used for classes. The VR headsets themselves can be checked out in the same way someone would check out a library book. Over the 2024-2025 academic year, the headsets and space have been checked out 105 times. These "interactions", as they're called, have spanned over 12 different IU departments, 9 of which are schools. While this alone is a very strong indicator of the lab's activity, it does not include the number of walk-in visits the lab receives on a regular basis. All of this is to say that the VR Lab is very important to IU and both its student and faculty populations.
I hope this is an effective cross-section of the many opportunities that VR technology has to offer IU as an educational institution. The industry surrounding VR is still growing, but it has become clear for those following that it can be utilized to great effect for education. This effect is felt by the IU Indianapolis students who use the lab for their coursework and by VR Lab partners and colleagues who seek the lab's assistance on a near-daily basis. The institutional knowledge lost from cutting the VR Lab and the Coordinator do to budget constraints will be a tragedy for IU and will not be easy to rebuild in the future. As someone who cares about both VR and Indiana University, I ask that you please grant sufficient funding to the University Library for the VR Lab to remain open and continue helping IU Indianapolis.
Sincerely,
[YOUR NAME HERE]