MIXibition Spring 2025

Join the ASU MIX Center for our Spring 2025 MIXibition! This will be a night to engage the ASU and Mesa communities with work from graduate students and faculty across various disciplines in the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Experience a night filled with FREE immersive exhibits and artwork, open for all to enjoy. The exhibit will be held inside the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center in Downtown Mesa, AZ running from 6:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. Be sure to visit the Forge Tower table in the lobby for more information about a brand-new lifestyle built for every one of your hobbies, passions, and projects no matter how big or small.

While you're here, visit the back patio for some Fuel Y'all Coffee to enjoy high-quality, affordable craft coffee, sourced from a local Phoenix roaster. They also offer a variety of teas and refreshing fizzers.

The night will be featuring MIXibitions such as -

105 - Enhanced Immersion Studio (EIS)

Led by Professor Sven Ortel

Description: This is a production-focused course centered on creating 360-degree immersive experiences. Students go through the complete process of conceptualizing, designing, and producing an actual 360-degree immersive experience as part of the coursework.

Featured projects from graduate students are:

How did oranges... smell? Look? Taste? Sound? Feel?

An immersive multisensory experience that celebrates the cultural fusion of Chinese and Indian traditions through symbolic storytelling, visuals, and sound.

A 360-degree immersive experience that places the audience in the perspective of an alien species discovering Earth's legacy through the Voyager probe.

An interactive space adventure. However far you go, D.S.S.R. is there to help.

300° immersive ocean floor journey revealing the impact of humanity on coral reefs and the vibrant life they sustain.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Professor Bea Rodriguez

Description: A luxurious cosmic experience that transports audiences into a Growth Scenario, one of 4 archetypes of the future that linearly extrapolates current trends into the future. Created by a team in the interdisciplinary, graduate-level course Prototyping Futures, the exhibit represents a provocation for the public to boldly imagine possible futures.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Professor Ed Finn

Description: To make a convincing future, you need to create a convincing world. Storytellers, artists, game designers, politicians and scientists all engage in the practice of building worlds in order to inspire, to question, and sometimes to terrify us. They create narratives, experiences and simulations of places, real and imagined, that combine scientific, cultural and aesthetic forms of knowledge. Why? This course explores the theory and practice of worldbuilding as a way to time travel to the future and the past, as well as to other configurations of the present. It also allows us to better understand the systems we live in and define plans of action to change them for the better. In this way, worldbuilding is a way to create collective visions for the future that inspire change today. Students study a variety of future worlds and build their own through collaborative projects that involve writing, making and public engagement.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Professor Kristy H.A. Kang

Description: How can cities and their communities tell their stories using new and emerging media?

In this course, students are introduced to unique and topical contemporary issues in new and emerging media with a focus on placemaking, spatial media, projection art and mediated public space. Students explore one or more issues related to the course, conduct analysis and exploration of a selected city and community and produce an original response that addresses a specific aspect or topic identified in the course.

The course acts as a laboratory to develop diverse approaches to visualizing and narrating a city's stories by investigating and researching a neighborhood or area of a city that has undergone rapid change and whose cultural history has been overlooked or is invisible to visitors and residents. The discoveries in the course would become the basis for developing interactive narratives and concepts for experience designs in digital placemaking. The classroom becomes an exploratory environment to excavate one's own city and find creative ways, using new and emerging media, to tell stories about the city.

108 - XR and Robotics Lab

Led by Professor Biayna Bogosian

Description: Focuses on the practices of design for immersive experiences using different media including but not limited to extended reality technologies. Students work on interdisciplinary projects using and developing their skills on composition/aesthetics of environmental design; programmatic/spatial requirements in both real and virtual universes; modeling/simulation of spaces/objects in 3D animated environments, motion graphics, 3D printing/rapid prototyping, storytelling and world building. Develops abilities to manage projects, work effectively in teams and transform research into creative/technological products.

123 - Sound Stage 3 | The Volume

Led by Professor Weidi Zhang

Description: A Walled City is an interactive AI art installation that constructs a decentralized virtual settlement in real time, based on participants’ visual memories. The project draws inspiration from the demolished Kowloon Walled City (1950s–1993), a self-constructed, densely packed enclave that emerged from a unique historical and political anomaly in Hong Kong, China. In this unregulated landscape, residents built freely, disregarding conventional safety standards. The resulting environment was not just architecture, but a living organism - part megastructure, part vibrant community.

The Kowloon Walled City serves as a conceptual foundation for the AI system, guiding the creation of a decentralized urban fabric in virtual space. Participants are invited to upload an image of a visual memory, which the system analyzes and transforms into a unique capsule or chamber. These chambers are placed within the virtual city, linking with others to form a dynamic, evolving community.

By integrating a customized multi-agent AI system, data-driven computer graphics, and interactive design strategies, A Walled City explores the systems humans create to build worlds and communities in decentralized, ungoverned scenarios, and how these frameworks shape our identities, experiences, and memories. The project reimagines societal paradoxes and examines complexity and diversity by drawing from the non-hierarchical historic urban fabric. It also investigates collective world-building, reflecting how our histories and memories can reaffirm human-machine collaboration, moving beyond mere idealism.

Description: Individual projects led by graduate students within the ASU MIX Center!

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Will Martinez

Description: This ongoing project uses Virtual Reality and a 360° immersive space to highlight the proposed mass deforestation of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Users will viscerally experience the "Lungs of North America" - witnessing the rainforest’s cultural importance to Southeast Alaska and the devastating impacts of clear-cut logging. Will believes VR is best used to transport users into emotional and physical places they otherwise couldn't access, which is why he chose this design approach to share this vital story.

This display is a prototype intended to gather feedback from ASU faculty, subject matter experts, and the Mesa community ahead of the full exhibition later this year.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Micaiah Wiafe

Description: The Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park stands as a monument to Ghana's journey toward independence and a symbol of Pan-African unity. My project aims to provide global accessibility to the site by creating a virtual, immersive representation of the site, accessible to users all around the world. By leveraging XR technologies, players will get to explore historical artifacts, experience guided storytelling, and learn about Ghanaian history in a fun way.

123 - Sound Stage 3 | The Volume

Led by Jialong Xu

Description: This project features “Points, Lines & Planes” and “Polaris.” The first performance is an audiovisual performance that connects an E-piano to TouchDesigner to create interactive VJ visuals, bridging sound and image in real time. The second piece, Polaris, explores wide-angle perception using fisheye effects to evoke a surreal journey through space and memory. Together, they reflect an evolving artistic inquiry into synthetic expression and immersive design.

208 - Dreamscape Learn Free-Roam Pod

Led by Jesus Franco Yescas and Dane Cavanaugh Toft

Description: Experience a narrative about escaping a world that's quickly running out of energy to sustain itself!

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Zesheng Wang

Description: In this fast-paced parkour game, players will travel between dense jungles and neon cities, challenging their speed limit! Use rolling, jumping, sliding and other actions to open up the fastest path in complex and ever-changing terrain and rush to the finish line in the shortest time!

206 - Dreamscape Learn Classroom Pod

Description: A next-generation immersive learning hub, equipped with 26 haptic desks and chairs and one professor station. Each station has VR headsets with inside-out tracking for narrative-driven synchronous and asynchronous immersive educational programming. The Classroom Pod is also used for VR development learning and research.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Professor Laura Cechanowicz

Description: Aeon explores the cyclical relationship between civilization and nature through a visual
timeline. Aeon challenges viewers to confront their place in the world with its central question: If our existence in the universe is both finite and insignificant, why do we actively destroy the only world that nurtures our being?

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Professor Laura Cechanowicz

Description: This course approaches immersion from the lenses of imagination, story, and play. Students learn and utilize playful methodologies for developing media content from wide ranging fields such as game design, choreography, theater, and a host of others. We will play our way through pre-visualization and project concept development utilizing analogue and digital tools, including digital tools that will allow us to experiment with new technologies such as AI and machine learning. Our ultimate focus will be on conceptualizing and/or creating immersive experiences that incorporate play and community engagement as fundamental elements.

Floor 1 Lobby

Led by Hajin Ahn

Description: In this tactile-only maze, sight is no longer your guide - touch becomes your compass. Can you trust your fingers to show you the way?

Floor 1 Lobby / Building-wide

Led by Sarah Duncan

Description: A scavenger hunt for all to participate in!

Screening Room 101

Description: Check out a 20-minute loop of imaginative, student-created animation shorts from ASU’s cutting-edge Animation program - where the next generation of storytellers bring art to life!

Room 358

Description: Endless Lab on Games and Learning is hosting an open house style event, with Endstar games available for play. We will showcase the winners of our recent hackathon with game trailers playing on loop on the screen in the lab. 

Rooms 333 and 359

Description: Explore the future of music and film through the Phoenix Music And Film Experience and learn about the Distinguished Innovation Fellows, 55+ adults engaging in meaningful post-retirement work.

... and many more interactive activities from students and faculty!