A virtual campus for a UC-wide course
An online course for engineering students spread across the University of California needed a place where groups could actually meet. I built a multiplayer world for it, shipped it on Mac and Windows, and studied how students used it.
- My role
- Lead developer and researcher
- Course
- BME 179, Dr. Christine King, UC Irvine
- Users
- 240+ students since winter 2025; up to 130 online at once
- Built with
- Unreal Engine 5, C++, AWS (GameLift, EC2, S3, CloudFront)
The problem
BME 179, Biomedical Engineering Design: Addressing Unmet Clinical Needs, teaches clinical needs finding: students watch real clinical procedures and identify problems a medical device could solve. Hospitals can host only a few students at a time, and the online version of the course enrolls engineering students across the UC campuses, which don't share an academic calendar. A shared classroom was impossible, and group work tended to collapse into solo video watching.
How it grew
The first version ran in the course's pilot in spring 2022: 360° and first-person clinical videos delivered in VR headsets, on Google Cardboard and on computers, so every student could take part on the hardware they had. The current multiplayer world has been in use since winter 2025.
What I built
- A shared 3D environment where each student's group meets in the world and watches its assigned clinical procedure videos together.
- Spatial, proximity-based voice chat, so a conversation sounds like it's happening in the room you're standing in.
- An AWS backend: dedicated game servers on GameLift with player login, and video delivered through S3 and CloudFront.
- A content library of more than 100 videos, including 360° cataract surgeries recorded in the United States, Vietnam and Paraguay.
- Builds for both macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows, including fixes for voice echo, a crash on quit and display issues specific to the Mac.
- A graphics auto-tuner that picks settings to match each student's hardware, from older laptops to gaming desktops.
- A step-by-step packaging guide, so team members who aren't engineers can produce new builds.
Research
Each deployment was evaluated with student surveys. The pilot's pre- and post-course surveys were published in Biomedical Engineering Education. In winter 2025, 113 of 121 enrolled students answered a survey on the global clinical immersion content.
In the open-ended answers, some students said the course felt isolating and asked for more collaboration. Others named watching together as the main benefit. Both groups had the same software: every student had an assigned group, and every group had the voice-enabled shared space. What separated them was whether the group actually met at the same time.
That changes the design recommendation. Building more collaboration features wouldn't help. Making the synchronous meeting the default, through scheduled co-watching sessions or a graded group session, would.
Published
- King, C. E., K. Diec, and D. Salvo. "Scalable Virtual Reality Global Clinical Immersion for Culturally Responsive Engineering Design Skills." Proceedings of the 2025 ASEE Pacific Southwest Conference, 2025.
- King, C. E., and D. Salvo. "Phenomenological Evaluation of an Undergraduate Clinical Needs Finding Skills Through a Virtual Reality Clinical Immersion Platform." Biomedical Engineering Education 4 (2024): 381–397. doi:10.1007/s43683-024-00139-5
- King, C., J. Wang, S. Rao, R. Sreedasyam, A. Kulkarni, S. Braich, I. Sharma, and D. Salvo. "Work in Progress: Development of Virtual Reality Platform for Unmet Clinical Needs Finding in Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Design Programs." 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2022. ASEE PEERFinalist, Best Work in Progress Paper