VRAI Lab
Research
Investigating and Analyzing the Processes of Tomorrow's Technology
The VRAI Lab at Purdue University is dedicated to empowering professors, particularly in the Department of Philosophy and the College of Liberal Arts, by providing access to cutting-edge technology in order to solve complex, real-world issues as virtual reality and artificial intelligence become more prominent in industry, research, and culture.
Virtual Reality
Simulating Digital Environments
The VRAI Lab has 11 Meta Quest Pro headsets, which are an ideal choice for VR pedagogy and development due to its advanced Snapdragon XR2+ processor, 12GB of RAM, and high-resolution 1800 x 1920 per-eye displays, which offer superior performance, immersive visuals, and precise eye and face tracking capabilities, making it an exceptional platform for both educational applications and experimental VR research.
Artificial Intelligence
Teaching Machines to Teach Themselves
The VRAI lab at Purdue's College of Liberal Arts focuses on cutting-edge AI research, emphasizing the development and analysis of language models. Researchers design and construct small-scale models using modern architectures like Transformers and Mixtures of Experts. They create custom synthetic datasets to evaluate these models' ability to learn probabilistic symmetry properties and perform causal reasoning. The lab also explores new theories to assess AI cognitive abilities through probability theory and causal models.
A key aspect of the lab's mission is education. Undergraduate and graduate students receive training in the mathematical foundations of machine learning, including linear algebra and probability theory. Students engage directly in research, developing machine learning software and curating datasets. They learn to apply contemporary libraries such as numpy, sci-kit learn, and pytorch to practical problems. This hands-on experience allows students to apply machine learning techniques to philosophical questions in mind, science, and ethics.
Collaboration is central to the lab's approach. The VRAI team coordinates with researchers from Computer Science and Psychology departments to develop more rigorous statistical and algorithmic tests of model capabilities. Their experiments probe the representational capacity of mixture of experts models and examine language models' ability to form causal and truth representations. This interdisciplinary work aims to deepen our understanding of AI cognition and its implications across various fields of study.
Games as Pedagogy
The Philosophical Classroom
Purdue hosts a philosophy course that uses the VRAI lab space: Introduction to Philosophy through Video Games. This course combines game-based pedagogy with traditional pedagogical practices to provide students with a new way of approaching life’s hardest questions. Traditional pedagogy consists of readings or lectures given by an instructor that guide the student through the course material. Game-based pedagogy uses games played by learners to achieve some pedagogical goal. Our Introduction to Philosophy through Video Games uses a hybrid of game-based and traditional pedagogy. It has students play video games curated by instructors and requires students to use their gameplay experience to discuss course readings. This way, games are used as a medium by which students learn a wide variety of philosophical issues.
Games are powerful pedagogical tools and their utility in the college classroom has only recently been explored. Anyone who has played games knows that they can narrow our attention. When we play Monopoly, for example, we are focused on the buying of fictional properties. Games also imbue us with new motivations. Not only do we focus on these fictional properties, but we care quite a lot about them. When used for pedagogical purposes, this combination of focus and motivation is powerful: students who play games with some pedagogical goal are focused on the thing to be learned and are motivated to learn it. Moreover, games seem to cultivate the player’s intellectual character. Specifically, games force the player to be creative and self-reliant in their learning—the instant feedback games provide forces players to adapt their problem-solving strategies quickly in order to overcome in-game challenges. Lastly, games tend to be fun, and students who get to play games with some philosophical content quickly learn that philosophy is fun.
Our various iterations of Introduction to Philosophy through Video Games have used a variety of games to teach philosophical topics. For example: we played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to explore the definition of games, the value of games, and the nature of curiosity. We used Papers Please to introduce students to a variety of ethical theories which would offer different prescriptions on how the game is played. Return of the Obra Dinn provides excellent lessons on how we should draw conclusions from our evidence and introduces students to a variety of epistemological issues. Lastly, we played games like Night in the Woods and Celeste to explore issues of meaningfulness in life, failure, and the value of struggling. Students played these games, engaging in game-based learning, but we also used traditional pedagogical practices. Each game was accompanied by lectures, discussions, and written assignments not unlike what you’d find in your normal philosophy classroom. In each of these traditional practices, we had students tie in their insights from their gameplay. Doing so allowed students to feel more engaged with the material and gave them novel contributions to age-old philosophical discussions.
Spatial Design
Fusing Industrial and Computational Processes
Integrating 3D printing and scanning technology into the VRAI lab enables us to bridge the gap between abstract concepts and tangible learning tools. Our Bambu P1P 3D printer, with its multi-color head capabilities and a wide array of filaments, allows for the creation of detailed and vibrant physical objects, such as customized board game pieces that align with our pedagogical aims. The lab also has a Revopoint MIRACO 3D scanner, which offers up to 0.02mm precision and features a 48MP RGB camera, which allows students to capture and develop accurate and detailed 3D models. These models can be used in VR and AR applications, enriching the immersive educational experiences we provide. Together, these tools not only complement our maker space function but also empower students to innovate and experiment, fostering a deeper understanding of both physical and virtual design processes.