Human Scale: An Architect’s Path to VR with Aishwarya Balagopal
Aishwarya Balagopal traces her path from architecture into creative technology, starting with an early fascination for how people move through (and feel inside) spaces. After growing up in Mumbai and later studying façade design at the University of Southern California, she talks about how “human factors” in the built environment—scale, light, material, and perception—became the foundation for how she now thinks about immersive experiences.
From there, the conversation follows her pivot into UX and then XR/VR during the COVID era, when she wanted a creative outlet that still aligned with her strengths as a spatial thinker. She breaks down why architecture skills can translate well to immersive design: comfort with 3D thinking, attention to proportion and sightlines, and a habit of designing for real-world constraints. She also shares lessons from building XR work for cultural and museum contexts, where storytelling, accessibility, and “presence” matter as much as polish.
The second half goes deep on VR as a practical learning medium. Aishwarya discusses her work with Virtual Apprentice on workforce training—especially scenarios where embodied practice and repetition matter (e.g., interpersonal dynamics and procedural training). She also describes a research-driven project focused on helping students with autism learn engineering concepts, and how that thread led her toward building her own VR learning tool aimed at supporting students with learning challenges.
Bio
Aishwarya Balagopal is the founder of Edlyxr and a VR product designer and creative technologist with a background in architecture and spatial design. Her work spans immersive learning and training experiences, including VR workforce education and museum-focused XR projects, and she brings an architect’s attention to human perception, scale, and environment into the design of 3D interfaces.
Links
Contact
Music
21 Ghosts III by Nine Inch Nails, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0Published
Feb 4, 2026