I never planned to become a founder — I just wanted to make XR easier for people to use. This is how that pursuit turned into building OXR, a platform for accessible immersive productivity.
From Curiosity to XR
Hi, I’m Chiao Lin (Yu-Chiao Lin). I’m an extended reality (XR) enthusiast, product designer, and now an entrepreneur building a tech startup.
My first real introduction to XR was at the 2024 MIT Reality Hack, where my teammates and I won the Enhanced Learning Track Honorable Mention and became overall finalists among 100+ teams. That experience opened my eyes — XR had evolved far beyond the clunky VR I tried years ago. It was intuitive, immersive, and full of potential.
After returning to the University of Michigan, a friend told me about the Learning Lever competition. I continued developing my project, CodeBloc, and won the $4,000 Development Award. At the time, I felt both excited and puzzled. We had a working prototype and strong feedback — why didn’t we win the grand prize?
That question drove me to dig deeper.
The “A-ha” Moment
During summer 2024, I teamed up with Vivek and Ting to bring CodeBloc fully to life through a self-directed internship under Professor Michael Nebeling at the School of Information. Over the summer, we built the MVP and conducted user testing with ten parent–child pairs, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback. Encouraged by the results, we began showcasing CodeBloc at museums and afterschool programs — including C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the Michigan Engineering Zone, and the Community Action Network. Everywhere we went, people loved it.
The “A-ha” moment came at the Michigan Engineering Zone. They gave us 27 kids and two hours — and even with our best effort, not every student got a turn. That’s when it hit me: XR hasn’t worked in classrooms because it’s not scalable.
Later, I talked to the teacher who brought those students. Their school had a few headsets in the library, but when I looked at the surveys, none of the kids had ever used them — even though every single one wanted to. Schools buy new technology, but when there’s no easy way to run XR for a full class, the devices end up sitting unused.
Understanding the Real Problem
To test this insight, I interviewed educators across K–12 and higher education. I visited Center for Academic Innovation (CAI), the School of Nursing, and the Ross School of Business to observe how XR sessions were managed. Across all settings, the problem was the same: XR is hard to integrate.
Most content was pre-built and rigid, leaving no room for teachers’ own teaching styles. One parent — a social studies teacher — said something that stuck with me:
“I can see this technology being used in education, but it needs to be seamless and give educators central control.”
He described how he used to take students outside to form a rectangle, then fly a drone overhead to show the scale of a pyramid.
“If they could explore that in XR,” he said, “it would be transformative.”
That moment reframed my thinking. Educators don’t just need pre-made XR experiences — they need a simple way to create, control, and guide them.
Building OXR
That realization became the foundation for OXR.
If we could build a platform that lets users create XR experiences as easily as Google Slides, and control what students see and do in headsets, XR could finally scale.
That same winter semester 2025, I took EDUC 618: XR for Learning, taught by Professor Rebecca Quintana at the School of Education. The course deepened my understanding of XR pedagogy and reinforced how essential it is to co-design with educators. We refined our prototype, and when we returned to the Learning Lever competition — we won the 10K Grand Prize.
That moment marked a turning point.
In summer 2025, I built a larger team — five developers, three designers, and one business strategist. We shifted from “student project” to real product. We whiteboarded architecture, redesigned the interface, rebuilt the database, and refined every user flow.
After four months of intense design and development, OXR v1.0 was born — a web-based platform that lets anyone create, present, and stream immersive XR experiences as easily as making slides.
What This Journey Taught Me as a Founder
Looking back, I spent nearly my entire master’s program exploring how to make XR truly accessible. This journey has been transformative — from my first hackathon, to multiple competitions, to classes at the School of Education, to real pilots with educators.
Hearing feedback like “OXR is pushing the status quo in K–12 educational spaces” from M.A. Education students means the world to me and my team.
I’m deeply grateful to the Learning Lever program and the School of Education, this is the kind of education beyond the classroom that truly shapes who I am becoming.
In summer 2025, I built a larger team — five developers, three designers, and one business strategist. We shifted from “student project” to real product. We whiteboarded architecture, redesigned the interface, rebuilt the database, and refined every user flow.
After four months of intense design and development, OXR v1.0 was born — a web-based platform that lets anyone create, present, and stream immersive XR experiences as easily as making slides.
