A Whole New (Virtual) World
By teaching problem-solving and strategic thinking as well as hard skills, the digital media program at UH prepares students for an ever-evolving technological future.
Story by Shawn Shinneman
Photography by Jeff Lautenberger
A Whole New (Virtual) World
By teaching problem-solving and strategic thinking as well as hard skills, the digital media program at UH prepares students for an ever-evolving technological future.
By Shawn Shinneman
When it comes to innovation, the digital media landscape advances in dog years. The core competencies students learned even a decade ago — say, website design or video editing — now only scratch the surface of what they may be asked to do upon graduation.
Today, students in the digital media program at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering Technology Division are ushering in a new era: creating immersive reality experiences, analyzing user behavior and exploring how artificial intelligence can shape human relationships. With coursework geared to the evolving industry and a variety of hands-on research and experimentation at places like the CougAR Lab, UH students are at the forefront of redefining what it means to work in media.
The digital media program produces not only technical proficiency but also strategic thinking and problem-solving — skills that remain in demand regardless of the evolving tech landscape or the content distribution medium of the day.
“It’s a growing field that has to evolve constantly,” says Tony Liao, associate professor of digital media at UH. “We prepare our students within digital media to be strategists who can learn and pick up a lot of new media platforms and technologies. That’s our overarching vision, because if you teach somebody one software or platform, it could be gone in five years.”
A Major Media Milestone
Liao’s interest in digital media started, of all places, at “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
He was a middle schooler in an Ohio community that had just suffered a tragedy. A girl getting off a school bus had gotten her coat string caught in the bus door. The driver didn’t notice, drove off and dragged the girl to her death.
In the face of the incident, Liao and a few of his fellow eighth graders created a plan to replace the door linings with bristles, allowing strings, straps and other small items to easily pass through the gap in the door, reducing the chance of a student getting caught. The team received a $25,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and a trip to Chicago to see Oprah.
Students in the digital media program at the University of Houston are ushering in a new era: creating immersive reality experiences, analyzing user behavior and exploring how AI can shape human relationships.
In Liao’s recollection, coverage of young people at that time (not long after the school shooting at Columbine High School) was not particularly flattering. Oprah was interested in spotlighting some positive efforts among youth.
“I’m 15, and I’m speaking to probably the largest audience I will ever speak to in my life,” Liao recalls. Backstage, a producer bluntly told the students to “be inspiring,” because they were about to be broadcast to 150 countries in 27 languages.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a lot of pressure.’”
The experience stuck with Liao, who decided around that time to pursue a career in media. He went to the University of Southern California for his bachelor’s degree, then got a master’s and a doctorate in communication from Cornell University, where he studied the impact that iPhones were having on society’s relationship to space and place. He taught at Temple University in Philadelphia and the University of Cincinnati before reaching UH in 2021.
“I had that seminal moment of experiencing big, mass media,” he says. “Later on, I decided I wanted to study the delivery mechanisms, the phones and now the emerging visual side of media. I got really fascinated.”
“We prepare our students within digital media to be strategists who can learn and pick up a lot of new media platforms and technologies,“ says Tony Liao, associate professor of digital media at UH, pictured here helping Abion Stevens with her headset.
“We prepare our students within digital media to be strategists who can learn and pick up a lot of new media platforms and technologies,“ says Tony Liao, associate professor of digital media at UH, pictured here helping Abion Stevens with her headset.
Where Technology Meets Social Relationships
By its nature, digital media is always evolving, and our individual relationships change with it in the process. That has become a key area of Liao’s studies: aiming to understand how new technologies change how human beings interact, live and establish relationships.
Humans generally form associations in three buckets: personal relationships (I know this person), stranger relationships (I don’t know this person), and parasocial relationships (I may recognize this person or know their name, but I don’t really know them).
Liao’s team found that something as seemingly innocuous as the app Foursquare, where people “checked in” at various physical locations, could reveal new truths about the arrangement of society in the iPhone age. People were now getting parasocial relationships in the digital world. They may never know the people they see at their daily Starbucks, but they’re checking a social box by interacting with them digitally.
“That was an interesting thing, that technology could sort of off-load some of our social needs and interactions through this phone,” Liao says.
Of course, in 2025, studying the societal impact of the iPhone is no longer considered novel. Over time, Liao has begun to center his attention on emerging technologies that remain ripe for deeper examination: virtual and augmented reality.
The Ongoing Evolution of Immersive Reality
Five years ago, when Liao was discussing his new role at UH, he had a request. He wanted to create his own AR/VR lab. A decade prior, doing so would’ve cost a fortune. But the level of computing, sensors and scanning had risen in capacity and plummeted in cost.
“It was like, ‘Hey, we’re at this point where it’s not millions of dollars anymore,’” he says. “‘It’s doable, the technology is getting good enough.’”
By 2022, the CougAR Lab was born, approaching immersive technologies from a social science lens. The lab aims to better understand how people are using these technologies, how they impact people’s perceptions of place, and how discussion around AR and VR may shape further development.
Already, Liao and his students have done some important and interesting work. One example: The lab has been working with a surgeon who operates on spinal cords. After you receive a spinal cord implant, part of the recovery involves standing atop a board, moving left or right on command. It’s a tedious experience. But Liao’s research assistants have been designing custom VR games that sync up with the floorboard movements to gamify the rehab.
Another: Working with the College of Education, the lab is designing software that helps teachers more seamlessly lay out their classrooms, which is a core competency for elementary school teachers in the program. Classrooms are traditionally drawn out on a piece of paper, but the lab’s VR technology allows teachers to check their work by stepping into the classroom virtually to better understand if the layout works — if tables are appropriately spaced and angles to monitors are conducive to learning.
One more: The lab’s VR pet study is exploring how humans wearing VR headsets interact with virtual canine or feline companions. Researchers at UH and beyond continue to try to better understand the effect that a 360-degree, spatial experience may have on the emotional, the physical and the attitudinal.
Even when our objective brains know what we’re seeing isn’t real, visual cues are powerful, and immersive reality experiences appear to have the capacity to create a stronger emotional response than something in 2D. Human beings in a VR environment in which they could conceivably walk off the top of a virtual building experience fear, for instance. And an experience with a pet or another virtual human may produce empathy or connection, even when the other “living thing” is actually AI.
“We’re at this point now where we’re like, ‘OK, VR has an effect,’” Liao says. “It has a greater effect, in some ways, than [traditional] media because of these unique possibilities. Some of that is interactivity. Some of it is embodiment. Some of it just being able to see new and weird things you couldn’t otherwise. Some of it is presence — the more immersed you are in it, the more real it feels.”
Albion Stevens, student council president of the digital media program, says she appreciates the multidisciplinary nature of her studies.
Albion Stevens, student council president of the digital media program, says she appreciates the multidisciplinary nature of her studies.
Prepping Students for an Evolving Industry
Of course, AR and VR are two of several exciting technologies that students are exploring inside the digital media program.
Abion Stevens, the program’s student council president, has given a variety of these technologies a portion of her studies. She started out at UH wanting to explore a career as a software engineer, but she soon decided she preferred something more creative, and she liked the idea of using technology to that end. She also has a wide range of interests that include modern languages and education, and she’s interested in merging these areas with her digital media background.
“A digital media student is not necessarily a specialist, but they can do more than a specialist can ever accomplish,” Stevens says. “Our leg up is that we can do graphic design as well as manage your project. Let’s say I’m applying to do some app development. I can be your user experience researcher to tell you what works and what doesn’t work, or I can do some form of data analytics and collect data. … We can bring more to a job or organization than just the specific skill they might have been searching for.”
“A digital media student is not necessarily a specialist, but they can do more than a specialist can ever accomplish. We can bring more to a job or organization than just the specific skill they might have been searching for.”
That’s of particular use, considering the fast pace of change across these kinds of jobs. Technology continues to disrupt how things get done, how people learn and interact, how messages are delivered. But students trained to be problem-solvers and strategists can adapt to the tech of the day.
Liao prioritizes that kind of high-level thinking as the program’s coordinator, a role he took on last year. Students learn how to do graphics, explore user experience, design websites and apps. They may take courses on social media, digital marketing and content creation. There's a new esports lab that has quickly become popular.
But the training doesn’t just focus on the capabilities. “You actually have to understand the back-end psychology,” Liao says. “UX is actually one of our biggest growing fields, because so many people are now asking for digital media students to have technical expertise and some design aesthetic expertise. It takes both.”
Where Digital Media Goes From Here
No one can predict the future, but if the last decade is any indication, more and more students are going to enter digital media. The program had around 300 students 10 years ago, Liao says, and today boasts more than 500.
What they’ll be learning three, five or 10 years from now is anyone’s guess. Liao sees AR and VR becoming a larger part of our daily lives going forward, as evidenced by the hefty investments from some of the largest tech companies in the world. Those companies are trying to find the right middle ground, Liao says, between functionality and fashion.
But disruption is just about the only constant in digital media, and some of the innovations of the next decade may still be sitting outside the public view. Liao and other professors in UH’s digital media program are trying to ensure their graduates will be well-equipped to react when those innovations appear.
For Stevens’ part, she’s considering going to graduate school. She’s been working an internship with Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Teaching and eLearning that merges her interests in technology, education and design.
Her exact career path is still coming into focus, but that’s as much a function of her wide-ranging ambitions as anything. Her experience in digital media has taught her that there are many ways to approach a given project — and, for that matter, a given career.
“It’s kind of like you have a lot of candy in front of you, and someone tells you to choose one, but all of them are your favorites,” she says. “It’s going to take you a while to decide what you actually want.”
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