About

Eric Shaffer is a Teaching Associate Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research areas include Computers and Education, Interactive Computing, Scientific Visualization, Virtual Reality, and Game Development. Shaffer has taught courses such as Computer Science Orientation, Python for Data, Game Development, Interactive Computer Graphics, Production Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, and Scientific Visualization. He has been recognized for his teaching excellence with the 2024 Rose Award from The Grainger College of Engineering and will be formally recognized at the Annual Engineering Awards Convocation. Shaffer's recent activities include engaging in meetings in the metaverse, contributing to immersive computing initiatives, and building educational bridges with local middle schools for girls. His work emphasizes innovative applications of computing in education and immersive technologies.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer graphics (images)
• Physics
• Condensed matter physics
• Multimedia
• Human–computer interaction
• Electrical engineering
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Virtual reality as a vehicle for education in the domain of structural building systems

  Computers & Education X Reality · 2026-01-15

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Visualizing Polarization Effects of Gravitational Waves Using Particle Rings and Surfaces in Virtual Reality

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Hybrid Voxel Formats for Efficient Ray Tracing

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Crystal Vision: A Virtual Reality Game for Learning Materials Crystallography

  Structural Dynamics · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen access

  The evolution of pedagogical methods has enhanced the traditional learning environment of STEM studies with innovative teaching tools. 'Crystal Vision 2.0' is being introduced as an adventure educational VR game to foster active student engagement and deepen the comprehension of complex 3D visualization of crystallographic concepts studies. It is in progress and being built upon a predecessor VR version 'Crystal Vision' which previously showed a 9% increase in test scores and a 19% decrease in test completion time over a systematic test on 84 undergraduate students. However, the results from the conducted surveys highlighted the importance of prioritizing user friendliness and motivation within the gaming experiences. The new, succeeding version attempts to transform the game by creating an engineered perception of the player through experiencing a narrative game flow, an enriched visual environment, enhanced interacting mechanisms, and a user-friendly gaming platform for sustained motivation and engagement to ensure an effective learning outcome.

  PublisherDOI

• Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning - Phase 3 Video Game Version Development

  2025-08-21

  article
  PublisherDOI

• GR in VR: Using Immersive Virtual Reality as a Learning Tool for General Relativity

  2024-02-07

  articleOpen access

  Using immersive virtual reality as a learning tool for general relativity

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Virtual Reality Laboratory Experiences for Electricity and Magnetism Courses

  2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2024 · 5 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Human–computer interaction

  Her primary research is the development and application of high-performance, first principles computational models to describe and predict the conditions in near-Earth space leading to geomagnetic storms.Prof. Ilie's focus is on developing new approaches to study the dynamics of plasmas and electromagnetic fields in the geospace environment and to advance the predictive capabilities of the complex dynamics occurring in the solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system.She combines both theoretical and observational work to develop predictive tools that form the basis of operational warning systems and hazard mitigation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Work-In-Progress: What Goes into an Engineering Decision: An Infrastructure Decision-Making Game for Exploratory Equity Learning (Phase 2 Multiple Stakeholders)

  2024-08-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Community resilience emphasizes the socioeconomic impact of structural failures post-disaster.This holistic view of structural risk has been driving studies for structural risk management.Since overall community resilience is achieved by the well-functioning of all community components, the concept of equity has gained attention in community resilience research.Key to community resilience and equity education is the emphasis on multi-faceted impacts of engineering decisions and systems thinking.However, the current structural engineering curriculum at the authors' university offers students only minimal opportunities for learning about the topics of disaster social impact and equity in their education.Despite the importance of incorporating community resilience and equity concepts into the curriculum, it is not a trivial task due to the concepts' complexity.These concepts are defined based on other complex subjects, such as multi-criteria decision-making, systems analysis, risk analysis, and socioeconomic disaster impact analysis.It is one of the reasons why these concepts are often taught in more advanced graduate-level courses, if at all, instead of undergraduate courses.However, introducing these concepts early on is crucial, since the vast majority of practicing structural engineers start their careers after their undergraduate program.To address these issues, we adopt an active learning approach and introduce an infrastructure decision-making game that highlights many different aspects to be considered in risk mitigation decision-making: equity, community impact, system performance, uncertainty, and resource constraints.In this game, teams make decisions about which elements of an electric network to repair and retrofit given constraints as hazards randomly impact the community.This paper introduces a new version of an infrastructure decision-making game which extends the original game to emphasize the role of multiple criteria in decision making by introducing multiple stakeholder roles.Each student plays a stakeholder role and champions their metric while the team collaboratively tries to achieve overall community resilience.This game is developed as part of an instructional module that aims to be implemented into undergraduate structural engineering courses, where students can connect retrofit strength levels with broader community impact.The paper presents the game development, along with results from a post-game survey, collected during a pilot implementation.This feedback demonstrates the effectiveness and improvement of the new version of the game in achieving intended learning objectives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• FocusFlow: 3D Gaze-Depth Interaction in Virtual Reality Leveraging Active Visual Depth Manipulation

  2024-05-11 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Gaze interaction presents a promising avenue in Virtual Reality (VR) due to its intuitive and efficient user experience. Yet, the depth control inherent in our visual system remains underutilized in current methods. In this study, we introduce FocusFlow, a hands-free interaction method that capitalizes on human visual depth perception within the 3D scenes of Virtual Reality. We first develop a binocular visual depth detection algorithm to understand eye input characteristics. We then propose a layer-based user interface and introduce the concept of “Virtual Window” that offers an intuitive and robust gaze-depth VR interaction, despite the constraints of visual depth accuracy and precision spatially at further distances. Finally, to help novice users actively manipulate their visual depth, we propose two learning strategies that use different visual cues to help users master visual depth control. Our user studies on 24 participants demonstrate the usability of our proposed virtual window concept as a gaze-depth interaction method. In addition, our findings reveal that the user experience can be enhanced through an effective learning process with adaptive visual cues, helping users to develop muscle memory for this brand-new input mechanism. We conclude the paper by discussing potential future research topics of gaze-depth interaction.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Enhancing Learning Outcomes for Materials Crystallography via Virtual Reality: Role of User Comfort and Game Design

  Journal of Chemical Education · 2024-01-25 · 7 citations

  article

  Recent advancements in computer graphics and hardware have driven the resurgence of virtual reality (VR). Past literature has reported the use of VR in education, especially for teaching spatially complex concepts. However, there are limited data available on the precise role of VR game design elements. In this study, we introduce a new VR game, Crystal Vision, which is designed to teach basic crystallographic concepts to undergraduate students. By systematically testing this VR game on a set of 84 students, we find that a VR-based intervention resulted in a 9% increase in their quiz scores (from 7.45 ± 0.16 to 8.12 ± 0.16) and a simultaneous 19% decrease in their quiz completion times (from 7.39 ± 0.24 to 5.98 ± 0.26 min). Finally, we find that a majority of students who felt comfortable while moving through the game indicated a higher level of agreement on most of the survey questions, indicating that user comfort within a VR game plays a significant role in influencing student learning outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cynthia D’Angelo

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  18 shared

• Daniel Čermák

  Planetary Science Institute

  16 shared

• Mei‐Yun Lin

  National Taiwan University

  16 shared

• Hsinju Chen

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  16 shared

• Marie Ross

  Dominican University of California

  8 shared

• Michael Garland

  7 shared

• Raluca Ilie

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  6 shared

• Chenyang Zhang

  Tibet University

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2001

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1997

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1995

Awards & honors

• The Grainger College of Engineering's 2024 Rose Award for Te…