Zade Bosco Lobo
Zade has been with the VR Club since its founding in 2019. He and his friend Daniel started UIUC’s VR Esports team, competing for their Beat Saber season in the spring of 2020. He was the VR Club’s first treasurer, remained vice president for two years, and became the president during his senior year. In the club, his focus was welcoming everyone and introducing VR to as many people as possible. His work on campus outside of the VR Club centered around VR natural interaction and game design, working on VR accessibility project, virtual labs for classes, and the first professional game studio at UIUC. He graduated in 2023 with a major in Electrical Engineering and minors in Computer Science and Game Studies and Design.
After graduation, he started working at PlayStation as an XR Researcher. He focuses on how to utilize different XR technology to create better gaming experiences. In addition, he helps out with multiple community XR groups such as CVRE, AWE, and ICXR. You might find him at a series of XR hackathons in the future!
Siwen Wang
Siwen founded the VR Club in 2019 as a college junior. His goal was to create a community of people interested in VR and the technology surrounding it. His dream was to explore the possibilities of “full-dive” VR, a science fiction concept that allows users to experience alternate realities by directly tapping into the brain. After graduating Illinois with a degree in Systems Engineering and a minor in Computer Engineering, he has begun to pursue a master’s degree from UC San Diego in Bioengineering. Having explored brain-computer interaction during his time as an undergard, he is now a graduate research assistant at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience.
Vivek Nair
Vivek was a part of the VR Esports team for our club, playing Beat Saber competitively for a season. Competing as “VCNinc”, he led our premier Beat Saber team to a second place victory in the Collegiate VR Esports League. During his time at Illinois, he graduated with a undergraduate and master’s degree in Computer Science at 19, one of the youngest in the department.
Since then, he has gone on to become an NSF CyberCorps Scholar, a NPSC Fellow, a Hertz Foundation Fellow, a IC3 Researcher, and an EECS Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. With his passion for cybersecurity and cryptography, some of his research has intersected virtual reality and the metaverse. He has authored papers discussing how adversarial programs can accurately infer personal data attributes of VR users within a few minutes of gameplay as well as how movements in a simple VR game can act as a biometric identifier for a person within seconds of gameplay.
Jaewook Lee
Jae was one of the founding members of our VR Club in 2019. During that school year, he started up VR Club’s first development course, VR Drift. He spent his time teaching students his knowledge in Unity and VR development through the course and following projects. His undergraduate degree in Computer Science and minor in Psychology has helped encourage him to explore more of the XR field and continue research past Illinois. He has authored multiple papers exploring the uses for VR and AR and deepening their levels of interaction.n
He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington studying Human-Computer Interaction as a part of Prof. Jon Froehlich’s group. He studies how XR and ML can work together to help people in their daily live. He also researches how XR technology can help with people overcoming disabilities.
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