USC XR Course Assistant

Overview

For the 2025–2026 academic year I served as course assistant to Professor Carsten Becker for both of USC Iovine and Young Academy's XR courses, ACAD 217 (Extended Reality Design) in the fall, and ACAD 207 in the spring, which was the first Snap Spectacles class ever offered at USC.

I designed and ran the technical curriculum: weekly hands-on workshops, step-by-step GitHub repositories students could work through independently, and open office hours where I debugged everything from Lens Studio TypeScript errors to spatial anchor drift on Vision Pro.

Across both courses I worked with students with varying levels of experiencing, building on Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and Snap Spectacles, three completely different platforms with their own SDKs, paradigms, and constraints. A lot of this role was learning new libraries and tools fast enough to teach them and troubleshoot them in the same week. I primarily worked in C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python, across Unity, Lens Studio, XR Interaction Toolkit, AR Foundation, and visionOS (and ocassionally 3D modeling).

ACAD 207 was USC's first Snap Spectacles course I helped run. I ran weekly workshop sprints in Lens Studio, covering everything from object sequencing and physics to UI interactions and VFX, building out a library of exercises from scratch that met students where they were and gave them something to keep building on after class. Each workshop had a companion GitHub repo with a full README walkthrough so students could revisit the material on their own time. Check them out below!

ACAD 217 is USC's core XR design course, covering the full spectrum from Unity VR and AR to Apple Vision Pro development. I supported students across all three platforms, helping them navigate everything from setting up visionOS projects for the first time to understanding the design decisions that make these experiences feel natural. The workshops I built for this class focused on the concepts that tend to trip people up like progressive immersion, volume interactions, how spatial UI behaves differently than anything on a flat screen. See them below!