A brief history of the VHCI Lab
VR is not new, but has experienced a resurgence, making it ‘new’ here in Nigeria, as it is in the rest of the world. Our journey with VR began in 2017 during a visit to Gannon University. It as at Professor Ikechukwu Ohu’s VR lab at Gannon that we first experienced what changed the course of many careers.
The Lab at the Lagos Business School started in a storeroom in early 2018.
We bought an Oculus Rift and a HTC Vive, but realised (too late) that we had no computer powerful enough to run VR. That was where our employers (Lagos Business School) came into the picture. Thank you Professor Yinka David-West (then Faculty Director) who supported our dream and LBS met us half-way, buying our first Alienware laptop. Thus began our exploration into Virtual Reality.
Princess Anifowose (currently a PhD student at the Open University UK) was the first research assistant working with Eugene Ohu when the VR lab opened. Wisdom was our first developer, then a fourth year student of Engineering from the University of Benin.
Then in 2020, with a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, our lab literally took off for the skies. Cynthia Emami, Ikeola Bodunde, Adeola Babatunde and Morenike Alugo, all four research assistants were co-architects of what is now the Virtual Human Computer Interaction (VHCI) Lab.