ASU Mesh Labs students create award-winning VR experience to educate about water re-use

Teams of Arizona State University student workers at Mesh Labs, based at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, have been actively collaborating with subject matter experts, researchers, designers and project coordinators to create award-winning virtual reality experiences for their clients, including ASU and community partners.

Most recently, they’ve developed VR education that helps Arizona residents understand state-of-the-art water-recycling methods. The project, Flow Forward, won Project of the Year at the annual Arizona Water Reuse Symposium, hosted by WateReuse Arizona and the AZ Water Association this past summer. It also earned the 2025 WateReuse Award for Excellence in Outreach and Education, a national award honoring outstanding achievements in promoting public acceptance of recycled water.

Flow Forward is a VR game where players get shrunken down small enough to captain a tiny submarine through the typical stages of advanced water purificationAdvanced water purification is a proven technology process that safely and efficiently purifies recycled wastewater into drinking water. (AWP), including ozonation, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis and UV light filtration. Players battle contaminants in each stage and, at the end of their journey, return to a group of policymakers, bringing with them the water they just purified. The winning player and policymakers drink to celebrate the success of AWP in augmenting the state’s water supply.

With funding from the AZ Water Innovation Initiative's Impact Water Arizona program, Mesh Labs project managers Qianyu Ma and Andrea Ramirez Cordero worked in close collaboration with Claire Lauer and her team of ASU collaborators to create and test a complex set of scenes, scripts and games.

“Flow Forward represents the kind of complex, multi-stakeholder project that Mesh Labs is uniquely positioned to support,” Lauer said. “The collaboration brought together students from the Mesh Labs and the AWII UX team, faculty from multiple disciplines, and external subject matter experts, all working toward the shared goal of advancing public trust in Arizona’s water future. We are so grateful for the hard work and expertise the Mesh Labs students devoted to creating such a dynamic, well-crafted solution to this pressing problem.”

Ma said the project was a “learning journey” for everyone involved.

"What made this project special was that it educated not only the Arizona community but also our own team,” Ma said. “While creating a fun and engaging gamified experience, we gained valuable knowledge about different types of bacteria and the process of water treatment.” 

The project has been tested via user experience with high school and ASU students as well as with residents at events around the state. It will be making its way around Arizona over the next few years as part of an NSF grant-funded project called WaterSIMmersive, which works with rural and tribal communities to develop localized, water-themed museum exhibit content for their residents.  It will also be available for free download on the Meta store later this year and as a desktop game available for download on Steam in early 2026. 

Mesh Labs Director Skye Lucking said projects like Flow Forward demonstrate the power of VR when you have a skilled team behind the project.

“There is so much that goes into creating an impactful and engaging VR educational experience,” Lucking said. “People often lose sight of the storytelling, user experience design, incorporation of audio elements, continual integrations and testing, as well as the constant touchpoints project managers Qianyu Ma and Andrea Ramirez Cordero had with collaborators and subject matter experts. It takes a great team and passionate client to get something like this to the finish line.”

Ramirez Cordero offered a similar sentiment, saying, “Even in between finals, midterms and capstones, the developers many times had to pull late nights to get some of those builds out."