Keefe’s 3D Drawing Course Highlights Benefits of Interdisciplinary Education
Department of Computer Science & Engineering Professor Daniel F. Keefe designed a first-of-its-kind three-dimensional (3D) drawing class in collaboration with the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota that blends common artistic practices with see-through virtual reality (VR) technologies. Now in its second iteration, CSCI 8605 3D Drawing in eXtended Reality is a semester-long course that builds off of Keefe’s 3D drawing research, putting his work into real practice with students across multiple colleges at the university.
“The biggest thing that VR can add to the practice of observational drawing is the third dimension,” Keefe said. “What we can create in VR has the immediacy of working with a paper and pencil, but you can work off the page and situate it into a space. You can scale and inhabit your creations in a true 3D space. It gives you a way to move the power of a sketch pad into your environment. Once you include observation in these tools, you can situate your creations in the world.”
The 3D seminar was hosted in the Art Technology and Science (ArTeS) Collaborative Research Studio, an initiative co-founded by Keefe and Professor Diane Willow in the Department of Art. Willow plays a key role in the seminar and brings an artist’s perspective to the curriculum and VR techniques. In its first year, the course had student representatives from four different colleges across the University of Minnesota, which was ranked the No. 1 public University in the Times Higher Education’s Interdisciplinary Science Ranking in 2025.
“My focus is on interdisciplinary, collaborations and participatory culture,” Willow said. “My background is in art and technology, and I have initiated a broad range of collaborations to introduce and support experimental digital and programmable technologies in the Department of Art, especially those that expand our relationship with the physical world and one another. I think Dan and I share a philosophy of having a context for students that is very multi-valent and multi-branching so people can develop their own personalized work. It's rare to find somebody who you're in sync with, and I think Dan's enthusiasm for teaching is really something that the students picked up on as well. He really loves what he's doing.”
Throughout the semester, students in the 3D drawing class learn the basics of working in the Unity VR platform while also learning about the practice of observational drawing. With help from Keefe, Willow, and PhD candidate Kiet Tran, students build a semester-long project that brings art to life in a virtual environment. The course itself attracts students from the art and computer science worlds, and offers an outlet for students to channel their creativity in a new way.
“I'm a computer science masters student, but I come from an arts background,” computer science MS student Sudarsna Mukund said. “I was dancing full time as a ballerina and then going to school part time for computer science. When I went back to school, I knew that I wanted to combine art and tech somehow, so when I saw his class it felt perfect.”
Mukund’s spring 2025 project aimed to bring dance into a VR context by bringing in the use of sound and the use of hands-free controllers. As the user dances, that movement and sound is visualized in a 3D space. The project was a good practice in moving from a programmer’s perspective to a human-centered, user perspective.
“For me, I feel that programming and computer science is often approached from a very heavy, linear perspective,” Mukund said. “And it was really interesting to be in this class and get to question, ‘What is this used for? Can we think about this in a different way?’ It's especially nice to have such a wide range of people in the room. I think everyone has some sort of creative practice and that gets brought out of them over the course of the class.
In the final years of his PhD work, Tran is a key collaborator in the 3D drawing course, as well as the Interactive Visualization Lab led by Keefe. His PhD research focuses on the 3D drawing software and has been enhanced by working with students in class to perfect their own personal projects.
“I think this is actually the dream of being in graduate school and what I think grad school should be,” Tran said. “With this connection between different departments, I got exposed to a lot of new ways of thinking and perspectives that I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I stayed just in computer science. I think these connections are very powerful.”
The course has recently been approved as a regular offering in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. It is listed as CSCI 8605 - 3D Drawing in eXtended Reality. Final project exhibits and demonstrations are open to the public in Spring 2026, and the course will be taught next in Spring 2027.