Gabriel Wozniak - VRchaeology (The: Stu/dio)

Overview

From May 2025 to October 2025, I had the privelege of managing the VRchaeology (VR Archaeology) project at The Stu/dio in Urbana-Champaign. The VRchaeology project is an educational VR experience designed to give students hands-on experience with real-world archaeological methods without having to leave the classroom. The VR experience was built in Unreal Engine and runs on the Meta Quest headset.

Lab Summaries

VRchaeology is split into eight different labs where each level is intended to be a lab for one week in the classroom. A summary of all labs are given below:

Tutorial

The tutorial is intended to teach the player basic movement controls and tool access controls.

Exploration: Geology and History

The exploration levels are a fun and accessible introduction to VRchaeology. The player goes around a touristy area of the cave and photographs different points of interest. As they take photographs, they are given information about what they are photographing.

Surface Survey

The surface survey level is the first level in the “archaeological site”. In this lab, the player must perform the first step in an archaeological survey: flagging all artifacts that can be found on the surface. The concentration of artifacts found on the surface may influence the player’s choice of where to excavate during the Excavation lab.

Set Grid and Set Grid Mini Tutorial

The set grid level walks the player through setting a single 1 meter x 1 meter grid square. To actually get a right angle, the player must perform a special measurement using two measuring tapes. The mini tutorial prepares the player for using the tools in the set grid level.

Excavation

In excavation, the player is able to start digging into the ground and search for buried artifacts. As the player finds artifacts, they must clean and sort them. A report of artifacts dug is automatically made depending on how the artifacts were sorted.

Wall Stratigraphy

The wall stratigraphy level requires the player to flatten one wall of a fully dug pit. After flattening the wall, the player is given the opportunity to mark the different layers present in the soil, and take measurements of the different layers.

Credits

I'd like to thank everyone involved in helping this project come together:

Sponsor
Dr. Laura Shackelford

Co-PI (NSF Grant)
Dr. David Wen-hau Huang

Associate Producer
Sepehr Vaez Afshar

Project Manager
Gabriel Wozniak

Additional Project Management Support
Om Mistry, Pranav Shah

Programming
Anish Gupta, Praneeth Rangamudri, Nick Simons, Aashish Subramanian

Additional Programming Support
Zach Krauter, Ezra Schur, Gloria Xiao, Weijia “Charlie” Zhang

Design
Madison Rosenberger

3D Art
Nancy “Nan” Kang, Dominic Larrieu, Xiaoxu “Johnny” Lyu, Yiwen “Tiffany” Wu

Additional 3D Art Support
Karan Ganesh, Mengzhen Yu

2D Art
Synthia Cao, Pengkun “Daniel” Mao, Ruoheng Yang

Music
Adrian Pawlikowski

Sound Design
Aubree Gray

Voice Acting
Olive Wang

Stu/dio Leads
Daniel Cermak (Director), Robbie Sieczkowski (Producer), Max Yang (Programming Lead), Aditya Bhave (Art Lead), Rodrigo Hidalgo Amat Y Leon (Design Lead), Sarvin Eshaghi (Quality Assurance Lead), Olive Wang (Accessibility Lead)

Archaeology Content Support
Emma Verstraete, Alexandra Zachwieja