From October 27-29, the Trans Realities Lab hosted an ambitious networked collaboration between Design Academy Eindhoven’s Digital Focus Module students and their counterparts at HKU Utrecht. This three-day intensive workshop demonstrated the potential of our XR-IT platform to bridge not just physical distances, but software boundaries as well.
The technical setup was deceptively simple yet powerful: students in Eindhoven worked within Unreal Engine environments while their collaborators in Utrecht operated in Resonite. Through XR-IT’s networking capabilities, both groups could see, interact with, and modify the same virtual spaces in real-time, creating a truly collaborative design process across tens of kilometers and two different XR platforms.
Students tackled provocative themes around our relationship with digital systems. The projects explored the emotional sensation of digital disconnection through glitching environments and fragmenting realities, trapped users in repeating digital systems where motion capture becomes caught in infinite loops or revealed users were unknowingly performing for a hidden TV production, playing with ideas of observation and control in virtual spaces.
What emerged was not just technical innovation, but a new model for creative collaboration in XR. Students discovered how changes made in one location could trigger unexpected transformations in another, creating experiences that questioned agency, presence, and the stability of our digital worlds. This workshop represents a step toward more connected, collaborative futures in XR education and creation, where the boundaries between platforms, locations, and realities become increasingly fluid.