Virtual & Augmented Reality Communication (VARC) Lab (COM-001)

Summary 🟡 ✓

Owner Unit: College of Communication
Sub-unit: Center for Communication Engagement
Content Type: laboratory
Campus/Location: Loop (14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room 111-112)
Last Verified: June 14, 2026

Description & capabilities

The Virtual and Augmented Reality Communication (VARC) Lab houses state-of-the-art VR/AR equipment to help researchers, faculty, and students learn how to communicate effectively and ethically in virtual and augmented reality environments. The lab supports teaching and research on how immersive technologies affect society, culture, media, and interpersonal communication. It is a unit of the College of Communication's Center for Communication Engagement and maintains a checkout pool of headsets and 360 cameras available for booking by DePaul users. It was launched with a DePaul innovation (AGIF) grant.

Access status

Level: yellow (Negotiated Access)
Rationale: Equipment and lab space are available for booking by DePaul users by contacting the lab director; not open public access.
Access URL: communication.depaul.edu/academics/initiatives/center-for-commun…
Contact name: Paul Booth
Contact email: pbooth@depaul.edu
Verification date: 2026-06-14
Source URLs:
communication.depaul.edu/academics/initiatives/center-for-commun…

Verification

Status: confirmed (✓)
Confidence: 90/100
Rationale: Official College of Communication lab page documents the lab, its location, leadership, booking process, and equipment inventory; corroborated by founding coverage.
Last verified: 2026-06-14
Evidence:
Official lab page https://communication.depaul.edu/academics/initiatives/center-for-communication-engagement/varc-lab
Center for Communication Engagement https://communication.depaul.edu/academics/initiatives/center-for-communication-engagement
Founding coverage https://academics.depaul.edu/liberal-studies/first-year-program/about/spotlight/Pages/virtual-reality-discover.aspx

Equipment

Find this resource from the Equipment catalog or site search (e.g. “3D printers”, “laser cutter”, “NMR”).

Category	Specific equipment
VR, AR, and XR	Meta Quest Pro; Meta Quest 2; Meta Quest 1; HTC Vive Focus Plus; Microsoft HoloLens 2
Cinema and broadcast cameras	360 cameras (checkout for teaching/research)

Related equipment categories

Taxonomy bridges to related capability elsewhere on campus (search these terms or open the catalog anchors):

Equipment access (via linked resources)

Resource	Notes
UNI-015	BETA Extended Reality Suite — related campus XR pool (capability bridge; distinct college)
CDM-003	Jarvis Student Center XR studio — related headset / tracking pool
CSH-022	Nursing simulation — related immersive clinical-training modality

Source: official DePaul VARC Lab page. Last verified: July 29, 2026.

Contacts (resource-level)

Website: VARC Lab
Email: Paul Booth

People & contacts

Named contacts from the people registry when publicly documented.

Paul Booth (Faculty lead) — pbooth@depaul.edu · Profile
Bree McEwan (Affiliated faculty) — Profile

Source URL

Official links and email are listed under Contacts above.

Documented Relationships

Unit of the Center for Communication Engagement (which also houses the Media Engagement Research Lab, the Streaming Lab, the OpEd Project, and the Open Learning Project). Led by Paul Booth; co-founded with Bree McEwan via AGIF grant GRA-886. Related campus XR pools (capability adjacency, not shared inventory): UNI-015 BETA Hub, CDM-003 Jarvis Student Center. Related immersive clinical-training adjacency: CSH-022.

Linked Relationship IDs

Documented connections

Generated from publication↔resource and person↔publication registries. Superscript numbers open Sources below. Multiple sources on one claim are grouped as ^1,4. Grant links are listed on publication and grant pages.

Publications

Graduation Simulator: A virtual reality conversation experience for second-year college students living through a pandemic (2022) — documented, uses · DOI¹

Sources

The decision to partner with the VARC Lab here at DePaul came from an understanding that face-to-face communication had become increasingly intimate since returning to in-person classes. Archived source retained by Resource Map maintainers. View current source

Notes

Director Paul Booth (PER-121); co-founder Bree McEwan (PER-122). Promoted from candidate RC-003 on 2026-06-14 via institutional web evidence (packet 2026-06-14-hard-tech-candidate-web-discovery). First resource under the new College of Communication (COM) prefix.

Linked publications

Graduation Simulator (Communication MA, 2022) — VIA (PUB-168). Names VARC Lab as production partner. Student author; Booth is not a thesis author.