News & Press

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Dr. Kimberly Hieftje is the keynote speaker for the 2026 Digital Health Symposium at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Her keynote, entitled " Serious Games, XR, and the Things Technology Can’t Fix", is part of a program focused on human-centered digital health, immersive technologies, implementation, and evaluation. The symposium takes place on September 23, 2026.

Wednesday, June 17, 2026

Our Co-Director, Dr. Kimberly Hieftje, and the Year of the Cicadas team received the 2026 Auggie Award for Best Indie Creator(s) at AWE USA 2026 in Long Beach, California. Year of the Cicadas is an immersive virtual reality experience exploring parental grief, child loss, and meaning-making over time. During AWE USA, the project was also featured as a technology demonstration at the AWE Playground and Art Festival, where attendees experienced the installation firsthand.

Thursday, June 11, 2026

Year of the Cicadas was named a 2026 Games for Change Awards Finalist for Best in Health & Wellness. Developed by the Year of the Cicadas team, the immersive VR experience explores parental grief, child loss, and meaning-making

Friday, May 15, 2026

Year of the Cicadas was named a 2026 International Serious Play Awards Finalist in the Healthcare category. The immersive VR experience explores parental grief following the death of a child through interactive narrative, personal storytelling, and immersive sound.

Monday, April 6, 2026

Cutie, a virtual reality intervention designed to support infection-prevention education for parents of high-risk infants in the NICU, was named a 2026 EdTech Awards Cool Tool Finalist in the VR/AR Solution category.

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Dr. Kimberly Hieftje moderated a symposia and gave a talk on No Screen, No Problem: Designing Non-Visual Immersive Experiences for Clinical and Community Settings and Dr. Frank Lee, our collaborator at Drexel University, gave a talk on From Idea to Award: How a Four-Institution Consortium Secured an NIH STTR for Life at 100.4. 

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Year of the Cicadas, created by Dr. Kimberly Hieftje with Dr. Asher Marks and Andrew Schartmann, received an Honorable Mention for the Best XR Gallery Award at the 33rd IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2026) in Daegu, South Korea.

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Palomi Kurade, our postgraduate associate, presented findings from our DPH- and NIH-funded Invite Only VR vaping prevention program evaluation at the 2026 SRNT Annual Meeting.

She presented her poster, “Evaluating a Virtual-Reality Video Game for Nicotine and Cannabis E-Cigarette Prevention in Middle School Students,” highlighting feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy findings from a VR-based prevention pilot trial. Palomi also delivered a paper presentation, “Vaping to Cope: A Qualitative Study of Middle School Students’ Perceptions of the Mental Health Impacts of Nicotine and Cannabis Vaping,” examining how adolescents perceive vaping as a strategy for managing stress and emotional distress.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Dr. Kimberly Hieftje gave a featured talk at the MiamiXR Conference from February 12 - 13, in Miami. Her talk focused on the development and evaluation of XR-based video-game interventions for health prevention and behavior change in adolescents and young adults.

Monday, January 26, 2026

Our Associate Research Scientist, Dr. Shu Wei, and her interdisciplinary team developed Love, Hate and Robot, an award-winning mixed-reality prototype presented at Reality Hack @ MIT 2026. The project is a playful XR “dreaming machine” that externalizes everyday inner conflicts by combining Android XR, Gemini Live, and a Unitree humanoid robot to support reflective and confident decision-making.