In May 2026, IMMERSE traveled to Phoenix, Arizona for the 7th World Parkinson Congress (WPC). This was a milestone event marking the congress's 20th anniversary and its first return to North America in a decade. Held May 24–27 at the Phoenix Convention Center, WPC brought together nearly 4,000 delegates from 60 countries and 185 speakers, all under one roof for a few unforgettable days.

What Makes WPC Different

What sets the World Parkinson Congress apart is who's in the room. While you may think conferences are typically exclusive to one audience, scientists and clinicians, WPC was not. It was designed to bring together the entire Parkinson's community, whether that be people living with Parkinson's, care partners and families, researchers, physicians, rehabilitation specialists, advocates, students, or industry groups. We all attended the same sessions, sharing unique and meaningful interactions. This diverse mix of people was integral in shaping our entire experience.

Our Time at WPC

We spent our time at WPC attending sessions on the latest directions in Parkinson's research, patient care, advocacy, and community engagement, while also exploring the exhibition floor and connecting with researchers, clinicians, organizations, and advocates from around the world.

A central part of our trip was presenting our work through research posters, which included IMMERSE's Living with Parkinson's VR project. The poster presentation gave us a chance to explain our work face-to-face, answer questions, and hear directly from the people who came by our table. We heard their reactions to the VR experience, questions and suggestions, personal perspectives, and ideas for how immersive technology could be used in Parkinson's research, education, awareness, and storytelling. This feedback was invaluable, as it gives us a direct opportunity to improve upon what we've built so far (we'll leave our improvements for a dedicated project spotlight blog soon).

Still, some of the most meaningful moments came from conversations that weren't during the formal presentations at all. Conversations directly with people living with Parkinson's and their care partners about their experiences, alongside the connections we made with researchers, clinicians, and advocacy organizations, gave us a clearer picture of how research, medicine, technology, advocacy, and lived experience all intersect.

The Biggest Takeaways

If there's one thing we want this recap to leave you with, it's this: meaningful research and technology should be built with the Parkinson's community, not simply for it.

Conversations with researchers, clinicians, people living with Parkinson's, and people in the community made that idea impossible to ignore. People actually living with Parkinson's were asking and answering similar questions in the same room as the researchers and clinicians studying the disease. This proximity humanized the disease in a unique way that labs and lecture halls rarely can. Presenting our work during poster sessions was important, but listening to the Parkinson's community mattered just as much, if not more. Hearing directly from people navigating Parkinson's day-to-day gave us perspectives that no research paper, classroom, or lab could offer.

"One of my biggest takeaways from the World Parkinson Congress was that some of the most valuable learning happened outside of the formal presentations. Hearing directly from people living with Parkinson's reminded us that meaningful research starts with listening directly to the community you are trying to serve. If we want to build technology and research that truly matters, the community needs to be part of that process from the beginning." Henry Lewis, President of IMMERSE

That's a lesson we're carrying forward into whatever IMMERSE builds next.

Exploring Arizona as a Team

Conferences and presentations are certainly demanding, but they're also a chance to grow closer as a team, and we made sure to take advantage of that. When we had downtime, we explored Phoenix and Scottsdale together, taking in the desert landscape and the local food scene.

In fact, some of our most memorable moments actually happened away from the Convention Center entirely: back at our Airbnb, cooking meals together and roasting marshmallows after long days. This was a seemingly casual part of the trip, but was such a fun way for the team to unwind and get to know each other on a personal level. While this trip was a professional experience first, it was also an opportunity for the team to spend time together and build stronger relationships with each other.

Looking Ahead

WPC 2026 was an important reminder of why we do this work in the first place. We came to Phoenix to share what we've built, and we left having learned far more than we expected, particularly from the people who took the time to talk with us. As IMMERSE continues to grow, we hope to keep integrating the human side of things into what we create.

Stay tuned for our next post, where we'll take a closer look at MotionSense and how mobile technology can help bring visual motion research beyond the traditional lab.

One task. Four steps.

Designed to turn isolated measurements into a longitudinal research dataset.

More than a left-or-right tap

The paradigm is a perceptual decision-making task used in Parkinson's research. MotionSense brings that task onto participants' own devices so the same measurement can be repeated remotely.

Designed for participants and for researchers

The participant experience keeps the task simple, while the investigator side organizes the contextual information researchers need to interpret each session.

Built for researchers, too

The investigator dashboard is designed to enroll participants with study IDs, monitor session data, and export results for analysis. Each session can connect task performance with the participant's self-reported context.

A research platform still being built

If you've ever read a list of Parkinson's symptoms (tremor, rigidity, slowed movement), you've gotten the clinical snapshot. What you may not have gotten is a sense of what it's actually like to live with those symptoms: the extra ten minutes it takes to button a shirt, the frustration of a hand that won't cooperate, the shift in independence.

That gap between knowing about a condition and understanding it is exactly what our Living with Parkinson's VR experience is trying to close. And it's why, from day one, this project has been less about building cool technology and more about listening to the people it aims to help the most.

Why Patient Experience Matters in Research

It's easy for research and health education to stay solely clinical, with symptom lists, mechanisms, and statistics. While all of that matters, it can miss the lived, everyday reality of these conditions, which is what actually changes how people relate to them.

That's the gap Living with Parkinson's is built to address. Rather than just describing symptoms, the VR experience places users inside simulated, everyday situations shaped by Parkinson's-related challenges. Through this, we hope to connect the clinical dots to what those symptoms actually mean for someone's independence, routines, and relationships. To be clear, no VR experience can fully recreate what Parkinson's feels like, and it doesn't try to. What it can do is offer an educational perspective grounded in the people who actually live it.

What We Learned From Speaking Directly With People Living With Parkinson's

None of this could be built from the outside looking in. This experience has been uniquely shaped by direct feedback from people living with Parkinson's, their caregivers and family members, clinicians and researchers, and students who've tried the VR itself.

By talking with the community, we've changed the project's content itself. Their input has helped the team think through questions like:

• Does this feel respectful and real, or does it lean into stereotypes?
• Are the simulated symptoms and situations understandable, or confusing?
• What perspectives are we missing entirely?

Those aren't questions a research team can answer on its own. They only come from actually listening.

How Community Feedback Shapes the Research

This valuable community feedback has both polished the VR experience and actively shaped the direction of the whole initiative, including the companion Impact Study, which is designed to measure whether the experience actually works as intended.

A powerful experience and an effective educational tool aren't automatically the same thing. That's why our team is developing a structured study, comparing the VR experience to another educational format, using validated measures of empathy and understanding, and gathering both quantitative results and qualitative feedback. The goal is to move past "wow, that was powerful" reactions and actually ask if this changes what someone understands about Parkinson's, and whether it truly changes how they think about the people who live with it.

Human-Centered Research and Technology

At its core, this project is a case study in what human-centered research can look like when taken seriously. Instead of technology first and people second, it's people first and technology as the tool that serves them.

That shows up in small but important ways. For example, we've only named symptoms and activities that are actually represented in the current VR build, being careful never to claim the experience replicates Parkinson's itself, and treating "the experience felt powerful" as a starting point for research rather than proof of anything. It's a slower, more careful approach, but it's also the only approach that actually earns trust, both from the Parkinson's community and from anyone using the research down the line.

Building Research With People, Rather Than Simply For Them

"Meaningful medical and health technology should be developed with a community, not simply for it."

This is the design principle behind the project. It means the people affected by Parkinson's are collaborators in shaping it. Their feedback doesn't get filed away and forgotten; it goes directly back into how scenes are built, how symptoms are represented, and how the research questions themselves get framed.

How These Lessons Shape IMMERSE's Work

Living with Parkinson's is really a demonstration of the loop IMMERSE tries to run on every project: listen to the community, build something informed by that input, gather feedback, evaluate the impact, improve, and repeat.

That loop shows up in how our members get involved too. We've gathered approved community feedback, reviewed the literature, refined participant surveys, and eventually helped communicate what we find to both scientific and public audiences: research, storytelling, and technology, all built around the people the work is actually for.

We're still in the middle of this project, as the Impact Study is a planned, in-progress evaluation. Still, the process so far has already taught us something worth carrying into every future project: the best health research builds alongside communities.

Scroll through IMMERSE's projects and you'll see finished-looking things: a VR lab simulation, a Parkinson's empathy experience, podcast episodes. What you don't see is everything that happened before any of that existed: the messy, collaborative process of turning a question into something someone can actually use.

Here's what that process actually looks like, and the many different kinds of work it takes to get there.

It Starts With a Problem, Not a Piece of Technology

Every IMMERSE project starts the same way: not with "let's build a VR experience," but with a real problem worth solving.

Take Becoming a Scientist, one of our ongoing projects. It didn't start as "let's make a lab simulator." It started with a simpler observation: a lot of students never get real access to a laboratory. The equipment's too expensive, the class sizes too big, the safety risks too high, or the opportunity just isn't offered where they go to school. These are all research problems before they're ever a design problem.

This is where research comes in first, with members digging into who's affected, what's already been tried, and what a meaningful solution would actually need to include. For a project like Becoming a Scientist, that meant researching what students are actually expected to learn in a lab setting: how to form a hypothesis, identify variables, follow a protocol, and, perhaps most important, learn something useful from an experiment that doesn't go as planned.

Turning Research Into a Plan Anyone Can Build From

Once the team understands the problem, someone has to translate it into an actual plan: what will this experience include, what will it leave out, and what should someone feel or understand by the end of it?

This is where writing and medical or scientific education expertise matter a lot. Members with backgrounds in science, medicine, or education help make sure the content is accurate and pitched at the right level. They write lesson plans, discussion questions, and explanations that hold up whether the audience is a middle schooler or a med student. For Becoming a Scientist, that means the curriculum has to connect the virtual lab back to real scientific thinking, not just "click here to complete the experiment."

Designing and Building the Thing Itself

With a plan in hand, the project moves into design and development, which is usually where it starts looking like something people picture when they hear "IMMERSE."

Design shapes what the experience actually feels like to use: the layout of a virtual lab, the visuals, how information is presented so it's clear instead of overwhelming.

Coding and VR/AR development turn that design into something interactive: building the simulation, the equipment models, the animations, the actual mechanics of picking up a beaker or running a trial.

Prior VR or coding experience isn't required at this stage. Many members learn as they go, working alongside others who already know the tools.

Talking to the People the Project Is Actually For

Here's a step that's easy to skip and shouldn't be: at every stage, IMMERSE projects lean on interviews and community engagement to make sure we're building the right thing.

For Becoming a Scientist, that means eventually talking with teachers, librarians, and students about what they'd actually need to bring this into a classroom or afterschool program. For other projects, it's meant sitting down with patients, caregivers, and clinicians to understand a condition from the inside, not just from a textbook. Members involved in this side of the work help schedule and run those conversations, ask thoughtful questions, and bring what they hear back to the rest of the team, since the people closest to a problem are usually the best source of information for how to solve it.

Trial, Testing, and Error

No project goes straight from "built" to "done." Before anything reaches a real classroom, library, or audience, it goes through rounds of testing and feedback. This includes hours of members trying the experience themselves, running it by outside reviewers, and figuring out what's confusing, what's inaccessible, and what just doesn't land the way it was supposed to.

This stage often overlaps with the research side of the team, since testing usually means developing pre- and post-activity surveys, collecting feedback systematically, and using that feedback to actually revise the project.

Getting It Into the Real World

Eventually, an idea has to leave the lab, virtual or otherwise. That's project development in the fullest sense: coordinating demonstrations with schools or libraries, presenting the work at outreach events, and building the relationships that let a project actually reach the people it was designed for.

And once it's out there, someone has to tell people about it, which is yet another role. Writing blog posts, creating short videos, producing podcast episodes, and presenting at events all fall under communicating the science behind our projects.

Many Kinds of Work, One Process

What stands out across every stage is how many different kinds of thinking it takes to get an idea like this off the ground: research and curiosity, writing and subject-matter expertise, design and technical development, genuine conversations with the people a project is meant to serve, careful testing and revision, and eventually, the work of sharing it with the world.

Becoming a Scientist is just one project moving through this process right now. There are others at different stages. But they each started the same way: with someone asking, "what if we built this because of a real problem?"

A weekly meeting is where IMMERSE projects may start, but it's rarely where the real learning happens.

Presenting at Real Conferences

In May 2026, IMMERSE presented Living with Parkinson's as a poster at the 7th World Parkinson Congress in Phoenix. With nearly 4,000 delegates from 60 countries, we shared the same rooms as clinicians, researchers, and people actually living with Parkinson's. In this setting, we put our work on display for the community it's meant to serve, and were asked all the real questions that came with it. These presentations certainly weren't being graded by an instructor on a class project.

This October, our team is doing it again at ANA2026, the American Neurological Association's annual meeting, this time in front of physician-scientists working directly in movement disorders, stroke, and epilepsy.

Presenting research this way teaches something a syllabus and classroom can't: how to explain your work to people who know more than you do, and how to hear feedback that actually changes what you build next.

Building Projects in Collaboration

None of IMMERSE's projects are built alone. Living with Parkinson's has clinical advisors in Dr. William Zeiger and Dr. Jennifer Adrissi, UCLA physicians who help make sure the simulation reflects real symptoms and real daily struggles. MotionSense, a remote Parkinson's research platform, is being developed in collaboration with the UCLA Movement Disorders Clinic itself. Members are getting direct feedback from the physicians and researchers whose field they're trying to represent accurately.

Some of the most important feedback doesn't come from a lab or a lecture. It comes from Parkinson's Community Los Angeles (PCLA), a community partner that's shaped Living with Parkinson's through showcases, feedback sessions, and shared patient stories. It comes from conversations at outreach symposiums, where people actually living with Parkinson's tell the team whether the simulation reflects their day-to-day reality. As IMMERSE's own recap from WPC put it: meaningful research and technology should be built with a community, not simply for it, and that only happens by actually talking to people.

Learning Through Direct Participation

IMMERSE also brings that same hands-on approach to the public. At events like the Neurological Disorders Awareness Night, the HANDs-On VR Demo Day, and school visits to places like St. Sebastian's, members run live demos, walk visitors through the VR headset, and answer questions on the spot. Younger students dissect real brains and build neurons by hand alongside the Parkinson's simulation, the kind of direct, hands-on science education IMMERSE is trying to make more accessible in the first place.

More Than a Friday Meeting

All of this adds up to a unique experience that looks nothing like a typical extracurricular: co-authoring conference posters, collaborating with practicing physicians on clinical accuracy, running human-subjects research through IRB, and communicating science to both experts and the general public. IMMERSE gives members the opportunity to actually do the work a research career or a career in medicine and communication requires.

General body meetings happen every Friday, but they're just the entry point into the club. The real work, building, presenting, testing, and talking to the people a project is for, happens on project teams, at conferences, in clinics, and in community rooms, all year long.

What if a student could step into a research laboratory before ever setting foot in one?

That idea is at the heart of Becoming a Scientist, an immersive educational simulation being developed through IMMERSE to introduce students to scientific thinking, laboratory research, and the process of experimentation.

Rather than learning about research only through a textbook, students enter a virtual laboratory where they can interact with equipment, follow experimental procedures, make decisions, and work through the same kinds of questions that scientists encounter during research. The goal is not simply to teach someone how to complete a virtual experiment. It is to help students begin understanding how scientists think.

Stepping Into the Laboratory

Inside the simulation, the learner takes on the role of a scientist working through a laboratory experiment. Instead of watching someone else demonstrate a procedure, students can move through the virtual environment themselves.

Different stations introduce components of the experimental workflow, including cell media preparation, an MTS assay, and Trypan Blue analysis. Students can interact with laboratory materials, transport samples between stations, and progress through a scientific procedure step by step.

The experience is meant to make the laboratory feel less mysterious. For a student who has never worked in a research environment, even basic questions can be intimidating: What does this equipment do? Why am I performing this step? What happens if I make a mistake?

Becoming a Scientist creates a space where students can explore those questions without the cost of laboratory supplies or the safety concerns associated with unfamiliar equipment. Activities can be repeated, mistakes can become learning opportunities, and students can build confidence before entering a physical laboratory.

Learning by Doing

One of the central ideas behind Becoming a Scientist is that scientific education should go beyond memorizing a protocol.

During the simulation, students may physically manipulate virtual samples and laboratory objects to complete experimental steps. In one portion of the experience, for example, the learner handles tubes containing cell media and moves them through the laboratory workflow.

These interactions are paired with explanations of why a scientist performs each step. The broader curriculum is designed to introduce concepts such as forming hypotheses, identifying variables and controls, following protocols, recording observations, interpreting results, recognizing experimental error, and revising an experiment when necessary.

That distinction matters. Science is rarely a straight line from question to answer. Experiments fail. Results can be confusing. Protocols need to be adjusted. Becoming a Scientist is being designed around that process rather than presenting research as a collection of perfect experiments with predetermined outcomes.

Looking Closer

The simulation can also move beyond the laboratory bench and allow learners to explore scientific concepts at a scale they normally could not see.

During the cell-based portion of the experience, students can enter a microscopic environment and examine representations of cells while learning how assays help researchers evaluate them. The experience then reinforces those concepts through questions embedded within the simulation.

This combination of interaction and explanation turns the simulation from a virtual laboratory tour into a learning experience. Instead of being told only what to do, students are repeatedly asked to consider why they are doing it.

Building the Simulation

Behind every interaction in the virtual laboratory is another side of the project: development. The simulation is being built in Unity, where laboratory environments, interactive objects, triggers, animations, and scientific activities can be assembled into a functioning experience.

Programming connects those virtual objects to the learner's actions. A tube touching the correct flask, a sample being transferred, or an object being picked up can trigger the next part of the experiment.

For IMMERSE, this makes Becoming a Scientist especially exciting because the project sits at the intersection of science, education, technology, design, and community outreach. Members can contribute in very different ways, from reviewing scientific accuracy and developing curriculum to programming interactions, creating graphics, testing accessibility, designing surveys, or helping bring the experience to students.

Making Research Feel Reachable

Access to hands-on scientific education is not equal. Some students have research programs, laboratory courses, mentors, and advanced equipment readily available to them. Others may have little opportunity to experience research before college, if they encounter it at all.

Becoming a Scientist cannot replace a real laboratory, nor is it intended to. Instead, the simulation can serve as an entry point: a way for students to encounter scientific research, practice its logic, and begin imagining themselves participating in it. The project could eventually support classrooms, STEM clubs, libraries, community programs, college-access initiatives, and other settings where laboratory access may be limited.

For IMMERSE, the larger question is simple: how can immersive technology make an opportunity that once felt distant feel a little more reachable?

With Becoming a Scientist, our answer begins by opening the laboratory door and letting students step inside.