Waterloo Reality Labs, based at the University of Waterloo, specializes in XR (extended reality) and spatial computing. Our team offers students hands-on experience with consumer VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) technologies. Our focus spans a broad range of areas, including hardware, optics, mechanical design, firmware, software, and machine learning applications.
Currently, XR lacks any consistent or prominent recurring student competitions for XR hardware. As such, we often build our projects, like Reality From Scratch (Rev. 0), out of pure interest.
The objective of the team is, for now, to simply build the best and most immersive experiences in XR, for cheap and from scratch, all while delivering an excellent learning experience for engineering students at the University of Waterloo.
Waterloo Reality Labs started in October 2023, originally as a student project between @Kenny Na, @Spark Mark and a few other SYDE 2028 students.
We first created Reality From Scratch (Rev. 0) - a proof of concept VR headset based off of existing open-source efforts to democratize VR. After meeting with Vincent and the director of the Sedra Student Design Centre, we officially became a design team during the Spring 2024 term!
Since then, we’ve had Justin, Nathan, and Anthony join our team to create our Software sub-team.