Contact Us

We are always glad to hear from students, collaborators, and anyone curious about the work we do.

Research and general inquiries: drlab@unl.edu
Questions about joining: dynamicrealitylab@gmail.com

Thinking about joining us? Have a look around the lab first, then read Joining the Lab along with the notes for prospective PhD students or undergraduate and current UNL students.

Lab Location

Nebraska Hall [NH] - Room W192
900 N 16th St, Lincoln, NE 68508

The lab is located on the west side of Nebraska Hall along North 16th Street on UNL’s City Campus, directly facing Kiewit Hall. If you are driving, parking is available in Lot 10, located just across 16th Street to the west. Nebraska Hall connects to the Scott Engineering Center immediately to the south, while Theodore Jorgensen Hall, home to the Department of Physics and Astronomy, sits across 16th Street to the southwest.

There is a bus stop (North 16th Street & X Street, SE) located right outside our building and visible directly from our lab windows, making public transit a very convenient option for your visit.

Campus map showing Nebraska Hall, the lab entrance, Lot 10, and the Scott Engineering Center

Facilities

The Dynamic Reality Lab occupies 1,200 square feet in Nebraska Hall (NH W192), built out for controlled spatial computing research. The space holds a data center (W192C), student workspaces (W192 and W192A), a conference room, and an outdoor footprint for wide-area AR experiments.

Compute and rendering: Ten custom workstations with Intel Core i7-14700K processors and NVIDIA RTX A6000 (48 GB), Quadro RTX 5000 (32 GB), and RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB) GPUs.
Augmented reality: Magic Leap 2, Microsoft HoloLens 2, and Snapchat Spectacles.
Video passthrough and VR: A fleet of Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro headsets.
Spatial capture and reconstruction: XGRIDS PortalCam scanner, Insta360 X5, Matterport, and dedicated LiDAR capture devices.
Prototyping and amenities: Alienware workstations for students, 3D printing equipment, and a student lounge.

On the **left** is the former DRL site at Texas A&M University; on the **right** is Nebraska Hall, where DRL is currently located.

Lab History

The Dynamic Reality Lab started in early 2024, taking shape at UC Santa Barbara before opening its first physical space at Texas A&M University. In January 2026 the lab moved to its permanent home at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where it continues to run wide-area outdoor AR experiments and study human-AI interaction in mixed reality.

Joining the Lab

We look for students who are excited about pushing on what reality can be, and who want to build and test things rather than only read about them. Everyone who joins the lab goes through the same three steps.

Read about our research

Look through our projects and research pages. Make sure the questions we work on are ones you actually want to spend your time on.
Review our expectations

Read the Expectations Document. It covers how we work together, how project ownership is handled, and our project release policy. Joining means you have read it and agree to it.
Submit the interest form

A lab member reviews every submission. We will email you to set up a Zoom conversation if your background looks like a good fit.

Interest Form

A completed interest form is required before we can move forward with anyone. Questions before you apply are welcome at dynamicrealitylab@gmail.com.

Prospective PhD Students

Every PhD student here is fully funded. Under the supervision of Dr. You-Jin Kim, students receive a monthly stipend of $2,800 paid year-round, including summers, along with full health insurance and complete tuition remission at both in-state and out-of-state rates.

For local context, a one-bedroom loft in downtown Lincoln runs about $1,090 per month as of April 2026. Our students can live comfortably on the stipend and keep their attention on the research.

Undergraduate and Current UNL Students

We regularly bring UNL students onto active projects. The same three steps apply, so start with the interest form above, and reach out to any lab member whose work interests you.

Research is not coursework. There is no syllabus and no set of expected answers. You develop your own direction, with guidance from a mentor.
Classes are still a good entry point. Spatial Interaction and Simulation, Generative AI and Design, Computer Graphics, Wide-Area AR + Interactive Narrative, or Advanced Topics in Software Engineering all lead somewhere.
Do a little homework on us. Read our recent publications, see what the PhD students are working on, then contact the people whose projects interest you.
Be specific. Tell us what you want to work on, which project, and roughly how many hours a week you can commit.