Schedule for 2026: Application Opens on November 1st

Deadline for Applications close on February 16th.

Apply Here via Slideroom

The XRTC Creative Research Grant is a collaboration between the STUDIO, the Kenner Room, and Extended Reality Technology Center (XRTC).

This cycle is guided by an inquiry into “Agents”

An agent can be understood as an entity that perceives, reasons, acts, and adapts within XR environments. While applicants are not required to create agential AI systems, we encourage projects that engage with the idea of agency in expansive ways: human or non-human, digital or physical, cultural or speculative.

We invite proposals that ask:

– How might XR environments themselves behave as agents?

– What new forms of storytelling, culture, or critique emerge when agency is distributed across human and non-human participants?

– How do notions of perception, reasoning, action, and adaptation take shape in XR spaces?

– As with previous years, the grant seeks to support projects that bend expectations of XR beyond purely practical applications. Projects might be experimental, speculative, or critical.

What is the XRTC?
The CMU Extended Reality Technology Center (XRTC) is a research center focusing on the technological advancement of XR. The XRTC is housed in the School of Computer Science with dozens of faculty members working on core topics in XR. The center brings together researchers and students from all over campus through research projects, courses, capstone projects, scholarship programs and residencies.

What is the Kenner Room?
The room serves as a versatile learning environment for students in the Department of Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics and other disciplines, supporting a curriculum that encourages creativity and engagement through advanced digital tools and media. Here, students can participate in hands-on projects that enhance their understanding and application of digital resources in language and cultural studies.
The Kenner Room hosts the SONA Immersive Storytelling Festival in which final works may be presented (if logistically possible): https://www.sonafestival.com/

What is considered XR for this process?
All topics related to creative research on XR will be considered for funding. Generally understood XR includes: Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, and other immersive forms that blend virtual and real experiences. Please feel free to expand the possibilities of XR in Arts in your application below.

Why this grant?
This grant is meant to both support and make visible creative research in the XR field.

As a new and in development site for research and collaboration the XRTC team and Kenner Room leadership reached out to the STUDIO to collaborate on an investment in Creative Research in the XR field. This is a first step in a collaboration between the Arts, Languages and Sciences within the XRTC.

Selected projects will be supported by the STUDIO and a grant advisory committee to spend down their funds, professionally document their work and publish documentation on XRTC and STUDIO platforms. In addition, supported researchers will have the opportunity to connect with the XRTC cohort thus creating transdisciplinary possibilities at the outset of this new Center.

This award is meant to support creative research not otherwise supported at CMU in the XR research field. Projects that bend expectations of practical applications are well suited for this award. In addition projects that have applied uses via unexpected processes would do well in this juried competition. The STUDIO supports the “atypical” and thus the often overlooked or unexpected or non-normative. Consider if your project pushes expectations, norms or is otherwise bending the rules of “common sense” and then it is likely “creative”!

Questions? Please email Director Nica Ross nross@andrew.cmu.edu