IMMERSE AT UCLA
Step inside science.
Experience medicine differently.
Immersion in Medical Education, Research, Science & Empathy
IMMERSE at UCLA creates immersive experiences, research, and human-centered stories that connect scientific knowledge with empathy.
Living with Parkinson’s
Becoming a Scientist
MotionSense
What We Do
Immersive Experiences
VR simulations that build firsthand empathy for patients and caregivers.
Research
Studies that measure real educational and empathetic impact.
Blogs
Accessible writing on disease, discovery, and the people behind it.
Podcasts
Conversations on the real-world impact of health and healthcare.
Current Projects
Living with Parkinson's
An immersive virtual reality experience demonstrating how Parkinson's disease affects movement, daily activities, and quality of life through interactive challenges.
Learn more →Living with Parkinson's: Impact Study
Evaluating the educational and empathetic impact of the VR simulation, now in the study design and IRB preparation phase.
Learn more →MotionSense
A movement-based platform supporting at-home Parkinson's assessments and symptom tracking through accessible technology.
Learn more →Becoming a Scientist: The Immersive Journey
An interactive journey through research questions, experimental decisions, setbacks, and collaboration behind scientific discovery.
Learn more →Our Mission
IMMERSE at UCLA brings the human side of science and medicine to life. Through immersive experiences, research, blogs, and podcasts, we highlight patient perspectives, scientific discovery, and the real-world impact of disease and healthcare. By connecting knowledge with empathy, we make complex health topics more accessible, meaningful, and personal.
Why IMMERSE
Medicine is often taught through textbooks and lectures, but disease is lived, not just studied. IMMERSE was founded on the idea that stepping into someone else's experience, even briefly, builds a deeper and more lasting kind of understanding than facts alone.
We pair that empathy-building with rigorous science: every immersive experience we build is paired with real research, careful study design, and validated outcome measures, so our impact is measured, not just assumed.
Whether through a VR headset, a research platform, a blog post, or a podcast episode, our goal is the same: connect people to the human stories behind medicine and science.
Our Projects
Four active projects spanning immersive VR, research, and technology, all in service of our mission.
Living with Parkinson's
Living with Parkinson's runs on a standalone VR headset, putting participants inside a first-person simulation where everyday tasks, walking, buttoning a shirt, reaching for a cup, become physical challenges shaped by tremor, rigidity, and slowed movement. The impact shows up immediately: caregivers who've supported someone with Parkinson's for years tell us it captured something words couldn't, and students who've never met someone with Parkinson's leave with a visceral, lasting understanding of the disease's daily toll. It's empathy built through experience, not explanation.
Day One
No Parkinson's Symptoms
Day Two
Mild Parkinson's Symptoms
Day Three
Severe Parkinson's Symptoms
Task System
Daily living tasks that reflect progression across symptom stages
Haptic Feedback
Tremor simulation through haptic cues and visual symptom modulation
Medication System
Medication adherence system that changes symptoms and task difficulty
Living with Parkinson's: Impact Study
This companion study exists to answer a harder question than whether the VR experience feels powerful. It asks whether it measurably shifts empathy and understanding, using validated outcome measures and a real comparison group rather than anecdote. That rigor is what will let us make credible claims about the simulation's educational value, and potentially open doors to using it in medical training, caregiver education, or clinical settings where evidence, not impression, is what matters.
Recruitment
Participants enrolled & grouped
Intervention
VR experience delivered
Follow-Up
Outcomes measured post-session
Validated Surveys
Established empathy & understanding instruments
Comparison Group
Results benchmarked against a control condition
Statistical Analysis
Findings evaluated for significance before conclusions are drawn
MotionSense
Remote research, closer to home.
MotionSense runs the Random Dot Motion paradigm, a validated perceptual decision-making task used in Parkinson's research, directly on participants' own phones, so no one has to travel to a lab to contribute data. That matters because mobility is often the exact barrier Parkinson's research struggles with most: the people whose data would be most valuable are frequently the ones least able to make repeated lab visits. By moving the assessment onto a device participants already own, MotionSense makes it possible to track how symptoms and performance change over weeks and months instead of a single snapshot, built in collaboration with Dr. Zeiger.
Remote Assessment
Participants complete validated perceptual tasks from home on any mobile device, no lab visits required.
Longitudinal Tracking
An investigator dashboard gives real-time access to session data, CSV exports, and performance trends over time.
Secure Enrollment
Coordinators enroll participants with auto-generated study IDs and one-time passwords; all data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Becoming a Scientist: The Immersive Journey
Real research, zero lab required.
With a national shortage of roughly 300,000 teachers and staff and high school lab construction routinely running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, most students never get to touch real research equipment, let alone run an actual experiment. Becoming a Scientist rebuilds that missing lab inside VR, so a headset becomes the only equipment a school, library, or student needs. The impact is in who gets to try science: a student who's never set foot in a research lab can now pipette, plate, and run a real assay, and experience what a research question, a failed run, or a working result actually feels like, often the deciding factor in whether someone sees science as a career they belong in.
Three-Phase Curriculum
Prep, Lab, and Test phases guide students from lab-safety basics through hands-on procedure and a built-in assessment, with wrong answers looping back to the information room instead of just marking a score.
Real Lab Procedures
Students run cancer-research techniques like the MTS Assay and Trypan Blue Assay with lab-accurate materials, an interactive microscope to view results at the cellular level, and a whiteboard to record their own notes, using procedures developed in consultation with a Clemson University research professor.
From Classroom to Company
After taking first place in a school research competition and securing community investor funding, the project is now in active discussions with Lablight AR to bring the simulation into schools and libraries beyond South Carolina.
Meet the Board
The students leading IMMERSE at UCLA. (Placeholder profiles, update with your officers' info.)
Henry Lewis
IMMERSE has given me the creative freedom to combine technology, education, and storytelling into projects that can create meaningful change. Through developing immersive experiences, presenting our work, and collaborating with patients, students, and community partners, I have learned that innovation is most powerful when it helps people feel understood, informed, and inspired. As President, I am excited to lead IMMERSE alongside our dedicated board, expand our educational outreach, strengthen community partnerships, and help members transform their own ideas into impactful projects. Beyond IMMERSE, my research in the Pyle Lab focuses on modeling early human limb development using human embryonic stem cells. Outside of research and IMMERSE, I enjoy going to the gym, watching movies, and swimming.
Full Name
Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
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Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
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Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
Mehul Paparaju
What interests me about Immersive Development is that you can take a viewpoint that someone has never experienced before and leave them with a better understanding of said viewpoint (and other viewpoints by extension). I do hope to go into the field in the future, whether it be through VR/XR development, simulations, or something similar!
Full Name
Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
Full Name
Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
Full Name
Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
Full Name
Add a short personal reflection on why they joined IMMERSE and what it's meant to them.
Conferences
Sharing IMMERSE's research and immersive projects with the broader academic and medical community.
7th World Parkinson Congress (WPC 2026)
Presenting at WPC 2026 put our Living with Parkinson's VR experience directly in front of the community it's built for: neuroscientists, clinicians, rehabilitation specialists, researchers, people with Parkinson's, and care partners from around the world. The conversations at our poster were the most meaningful validation we've gotten yet: people with Parkinson's told us the simulation captured real aspects of their daily experience, and clinicians saw potential for it as a teaching tool in their own training programs. It sharpened our sense of who this project serves and why the empathy-building approach matters.
ANA2026: 151st Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association
IMMERSE will present a poster on our Living with Parkinson's VR experience at ANA2026, the 151st Annual Meeting of the American Neurological Association, the premier professional society for academic neurologists and neuroscientists since 1875. We're looking forward to sharing our work with the physician-scientists and researchers driving advances in movement disorders, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, and brain health more broadly.
Educational Outreach
Bringing school visits, symposiums, demonstrations, and workshops to students and communities across UCLA and beyond.
HANDs-On: VR Undergraduate Demo Day
April 20, 2026Showcasing Living with Parkinson's and Becoming a Scientist alongside other student VR projects put our work in front of a totally different crowd: developers, storytellers, and technologists outside the medical and Parkinson's communities we usually reach. Watching people with no healthcare background put on the headset and immediately grasp what living with Parkinson's feels like was a strong signal that the empathy-building approach translates broadly, not just within medicine. It also sparked new conversations about where immersive technology and healthcare could go next.
Parkinson's Disease Research Community Outreach Symposium
April 11, 2026Presenting our booth alongside talks from UCLA neurology faculty put us directly in front of the researchers and clinicians driving Parkinson's science forward, as well as people with Parkinson's and care partners from the local community. Several attendees who have lived with Parkinson's told us the VR experience reflected real aspects of their day-to-day challenges, meaningful confirmation that we're building something authentic. It also opened the door to conversations with UCLA researchers about how immersive tools like ours could support their own work.
St. Sebastian's School: Winter Outreach
Winter 2026IMMERSE brought hands-on neuroscience to three grade groups at St. Sebastian's, pairing edible neuron modeling, a sensory taste experience, a real mammalian brain dissection, and our Living with Parkinson's VR experience. For many of these students, it was their first time holding a real brain, building a neuron by hand, or stepping into VR to understand what it feels like to live with a movement disorder. Kids left the morning curious and asking questions about neuroscience and medicine, exactly the kind of early spark we're hoping to create, and a reminder that empathy for conditions like Parkinson's can start young.
What Participants Experience
Through hands-on demonstrations of the Living with Parkinson's VR experience, real brain dissections, and interactive neuron-building activities, participants engage directly with the human side of medicine and research, not just reading about the brain, but building it, dissecting it, and stepping inside what it's like to live with a neurological condition.
Students leave with a concrete, hands-on understanding of how the brain works, genuine empathy for patients living with chronic illness like Parkinson's, and an early, memorable glimpse of what a career in medicine or research can look like.
The IMMERSE Podcast
Conversations on medicine, research, VR, accessibility, and patient experience.
Episode Title Goes Here
A short description of what this episode covers: the guest's background, the topics discussed, and why it matters to the IMMERSE community.
Episode Title
Short description of the episode's topic and key discussion points.
Episode Title
Short description of the episode's topic and key discussion points.
Episode Title
Short description of the episode's topic and key discussion points.
The IMMERSE Blog
Project updates, conference recaps, spotlights, and behind-the-scenes stories from the team.
Post Title Goes Here
Short excerpt summarizing the latest progress on one of our active projects.
Read more →Post Title Goes Here
Short excerpt recapping a recent conference presentation and what the team learned.
Read more →Post Title Goes Here
Short excerpt featuring a member or researcher and their path into medicine or research.
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Short excerpt on VR development: design decisions, technical challenges, and what's next.
Read more →Post Title Goes Here
Short excerpt making a complex health topic accessible to a general audience.
Read more →Post Title Goes Here
Short excerpt sharing a patient or community perspective, published with proper consent.
Read more →Get Involved
No prior medical or coding experience required, just curiosity and empathy.
New member recruitment opens Fall 2026. Sign up below to be notified.
Ways to Join
- Join a project team (VR development, research, technology, media)
- Contribute to the blog or help produce podcast episodes
- Volunteer at outreach events and simulation demos
- Support research efforts, from literature review to data analysis
Who We're Looking For
- Students interested in medicine, public health, research, or design
- Storytellers, writers, and podcast hosts
- Developers curious about VR and health technology
- Anyone who wants to make science and medicine more human
Meetings
- General body meetings: Fridays, 6–7 PM at Ackerman Union, Viewpoint Conference Rooms
- Project team meetings: scheduled separately by team leads
Join Our Mailing List
The fastest way to hear about meetings, events, and openings is to join our Google Group.
Join the Google GroupOr Tell Us About Yourself
Contact Us
Have a question, partnership idea, or just want to learn more? Reach out.
Meetings
Fridays, 6–7 PM
Ackerman Union, Viewpoint Conference Rooms