The Speakers

At BLCK UNICRN, we are building an AI-powered operating system and marketplace that empowers creators, educators, and brands to design, launch, and monetize immersive experiences without requiring technical expertise. Our platform features a no-code builder, AI co-creation tools, and a dynamic marketplace where users can create XR experiences and connect with sponsors, audiences, and organizations.

For UCLA XRI Demo Day, we would like to showcase our immersive operating system — highlighting how users can quickly build and publish XR experiences across mobile, desktop, and headset devices — along with our marketplace infrastructure that enables experience discovery, distribution, and monetization. Our work emphasizes accessibility (WebXR standards), ethical storytelling, and inclusive design principles.

BLCK UNICRN was incubated at the UCLA Anderson Venture Accelerator and Berkeley SkyDeck, and reflects a commitment to expanding access to XR creation and driving real-world impact across education, entertainment, health, and community engagement sectors. We’re excited to demonstrate how our platform can help democratize the future of immersive content.

The Virtual Reality-Reward Program is a novel training program developed by Dr. Michelle Craske which involves immersion in VR scenes followed by subsequent guided memory recounting exercises. Informed by neuroscience, the Virtual Reality-Reward Program was developed to target symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Our lab, led by Dr. Katy Cross at the Department of Neurology, uses virtual reality to study gait dysfunction in patients with Parkinson’s disease. We take a multimodal recording approach that combines intracranial EEG, scalp EEG, motion capture, and immersive VR environments to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying freezing of gait in Parkinson’s patients.

Freezing of gait is a phenomenon where patients are unable to take a step despite the intention to do so. In this talk, I will share two different experimental VR setups: one developed in Unity and the other that is being developed in Unreal Engine. These scenes recreate real-world scenarios designed to trigger freezing episodes in individuals with Parkinson’s disease.

I’m excited to pitch RealityCheck, a creator-first discoverability platform currently in development through UCLA Anderson’s entrepreneurship program. We've completed our initial validation phase—confirming demand among creators—and are now testing key audience assumptions: what motivates fans to explore and support interactive entertainment, including XR, metaverse events, and location-based experiences?

RealityCheck’s mission is to support XR and interactive creators by giving them a home outside siloed ecosystems—offering tools for visibility, monetization, and deeper fan engagement. For fans, we’re building an easy-to-use, platform-agnostic directory to discover content across formats and devices. Whether it’s a WebXR world, a ticketed immersive show, or a local AR experience, RealityCheck helps fans find and follow the creators behind it.

This showcase is a crucial opportunity to share our pitch deck and get early feedback from attendees. Would they use a platform like this? If not, what would make them care? I’m especially eager to learn what discovery behaviors fans already have, what’s missing, and how our platform could become essential.

Ideally, this project will be further developed through Anderson’s Business Creation Option (BCO) over the next year. If we see traction—either through revenue or early fundraising—I would love to pursue it full time post-graduation.

Above all, I want to understand if this is solving a real problem for the community. The insights from this pitch session will help shape whether RealityCheck becomes a niche tool—or a foundational platform that helps the XR and interactive creator economy thrive.

Virtual Herbaria questions the way we visualize and utilize large data sets, archives, and libraries. Virtual Herbaria revives the regional flora and spatializes the data through a colorful game of three-dimensional augmented digital plants. Putting our preconceived understanding of nature and technology under scrutiny and looking together ahead at more sustainable futures.

We are currently building a Pilot Project to offer an immersive experience in Basque language and culture, while using AI powered resources. This Pilot is based in part in WondaVR platform, and we also have used the ChatGPT Enterprise License granted by GenAI Initiative at UCLA to design different activities to learn the language. Currently, we are implementing these resources and starting to get some data for later assessment.

Multispecies Ethnography and Virtual Reality in Bhutanese Highland Ecosystems

My research engages anthropology and technology to explore migration, development, and socio-economic inequality in Bhutan through a multispecies lens. I created a virtual reality-enabled multispecies ethnography, my recent fieldwork project invited Bhutanese interlocutors—yak herders, rural villagers, and urban communities—to generate their own narratives on development.

I employed a multispecies ethnographic method: a 360-degree camera mounted on a yak’s horns, horses head, and a dog’s head which offered a decentered perspective on herding life, slowing human perception to the rhythms of the animals. The resulting footage challenged human-centric views of mobility and labor, offering new modes of experiencing pastoral life and reconsidering the role of animals in shaping Bhutan’s economy and environment.

Methodologically, I contribute to ethnographic practice by employing immersive virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree video/audio techniques to create interactive, sensorial experiences for my interlocutors. These visual methods enable an alternative epistemological approach distinct from traditional written arguments.

By merging VR with ethnographic inquiry, my project investigates how fieldwork can generate alternative forms of knowledge. The study of yaks through VR prompts new ways of experiencing tensions between modernization and tradition. In doing so, it expands the role of anthropology by integrating multispecies collaboration, technology, and community engagement to document a rapidly- shifting space.

BRICKED is an ongoing XR writing environment bearing witness to memory loss. In the summer of 2019, my family orchestrated what would later become a final vacation with my grandmother, who had recently been diagnosed with dementia, and my father, who passed shortly thereafter. In the work, an exhaustive inventory of the objects that populated this trip is accompanied by text fragments on the losses that accumulate within both human and technical memory systems. These samples are arranged in an XR space for the live composition and performance of their contents, providing a model for immersive modes of expanded comics practices. 

I will share how VR experiences can help reduce anxiety in patients before medical procedures. I will illustrate this by demonstrating a gamified VR experience for children to introduce them to the perioperative environment and reduce their anxiety before surgery. 

An update on the projects being developed by the XRAM subcommittee.