OXR

06/06/2026

OXR secures a $25,000 investment from the University of Michigan’s Desai Accelerator and joins a cohort of emerging Michigan startups advancing AI, healthcare, sports, real estate, and immersive technology.

“Watching Desai founders pitch in 2024 planted a seed for us,” said Chiao Lin. “As University of Michigan graduates, and as someone who grew as a founder through the Zell Entrepreneurs program, joining the Desai Accelerator feels like coming home. We are truly grateful for this opportunity and for the support of a community that has continued to believe in us. After a year of building Mixel Studio with persistence and hard work after graduation, this moment makes us feel seen, supported, and ready for the next stage.”

Mixel Studio’s spatial presentation platform OXR secures a $25,000 investment from the University of Michigan’s Desai Accelerator and joins a cohort of emerging Michigan startups advancing AI, healthcare, sports, real estate, and immersive technology.

06/03/2026

We’re excited to share that OXR has joined the University of Michigan’s Desai Accelerator Class of 2026, securing a $25K investment to support our next stage of growth.

Over the next four months, the Desai Accelerator will provide our team with dedicated mentorship, strategic resources, and intern support as we continue scaling OXR and expanding our market reach.

Desai’s approach to venture creation combines Silicon Valley best practices with the academic rigor and innovation ecosystem of the University of Michigan, making this a meaningful opportunity for our team as we move from product validation toward broader market deployment.

We have also filed the trademark for OXR as we continue building the platform as a dedicated product and brand. Moving forward, if you’d like to follow the latest updates specifically about OXR, please follow our OXR page.

Excited for what’s ahead.
P.S. we just updated our FB account from Mixel Studio to OXR)

05/30/2026

We’re excited to share that OXR has been named a finalist for the 2026 Auggie Awards in the Best Content Creation Tool category.

The Auggie Awards, presented by AWE, have recognized some of the most influential companies and products in XR and spatial computing since 2010. This year, OXR is honored to be selected alongside global XR leaders, including Zappar’s Mattercraft, as part of a highly competitive finalist group.

Through real-world deployments across education, training, design, and live demonstration settings, we have learned that making XR accessible requires more than isolated creation tools. It requires giving users agency over what they create, how they present, and how their audiences engage — without forcing them to depend entirely on specialized technical teams.

This milestone is a meaningful validation of our vision: to make immersive experiences easier to build, reuse, deploy, and scale across web and XR devices.

Thank you to everyone who has supported OXR and Mixel Studio along the way. We’re just getting started.

OXR recognized alongside global XR leaders for its integrated immersive experience workflow spanning content creation, real-time publishing, multi-device deployment, and live session control.

05/22/2026

We're excited to share that OXR by Mixel Studio, Inc. has been selected as a finalist in the Best Content Creation Tool category for the 2026 Auggie Awards at AWE.

While this recognition is in content creation, OXR is about much more than creating XR content. OXR is an integrated system that supports the full workflow of immersive experiences, from creation and publishing to multi-device deployment and live session control, making XR experiences easier to reuse and scale.

We’ll also be exhibiting at AWE 2026 at Startup Table S16, with most of our team, including Anhua Wu and Tiger Zhang. We’re also happy to share the table with our good friend and fellow University of Michigan alum, Jingle Chen, who will be showcasing his project, Strata. Come check out what we’ve been building.

04/24/2026

We’re excited to share that OXR by Mixel Studio has been selected to participate in the AWE Auggie Awards, part of Augmented World Expo, the world’s largest XR industry event.

If you’ve been following our journey or believe in making XR more accessible and scalable:
→ Click “vote for your favorite project”
→ Sign in with your Google account
→ Navigate to Best Content Creation Tool
→ Select OXR and vote for us

OXR is our vision of “Canva + Zoom for XR”, a platform that enables non-technical teams to create, deploy, and run immersive experiences across XR headsets and web devices, without engineering overhead.

Every vote helps amplify a future where immersive experiences are not limited by technical barriers. We truly appreciate your support!

The annual Auggie Awards have been the most recognized AR & VR industry awards in the world since 2010. Now in their 17th year, the Auggies continue to showcase the best of the best in augmented, virtual and mixed reality.

04/01/2026

Mixel Studio showcased at the record-breaking Michigan Founders Fund Pre-Accelerator powered by gener8tor Winter 2026 Founder Showcase, being selected as one of only five companies from a pool of 122 applicants. Through its participation in the gener8tor gBETA program, the team debuted OXR—the “Canva + Zoom for XR”—and secured $15,000 in non-dilutive funding for its integration of fragmented mixed reality workflows. This achievement, coupled with immediate interest from Michigan-based VCs, signals a major leap forward in democratizing immersive technology for everyday devices.

Read the full release here:

Mixel Studio shocased at the record-breaking Michigan Founders Fund Showcase, being selected as one of only five companies from a pool of 122 applicants. By debuting OXR—the "Canva + Zoom for XR"—the team secured $15,000 in funding and attracted immediate interest from Michigan-based VCs, signal...

03/31/2026

This year marked a significant milestone for Mixel Studio as our founders, Chiao Lin and Anhua Wu, was selected to lead as a tutorial instructor at IEEE VR 2026 in Daegu, Korea—one of the world’s leading conferences in virtual and augmented reality.

We shared our work on designing authorable mixed reality systems and what it takes to move XR in into real-world deployment. Seeing a full room, thoughtful questions, and genuine interest in applying XR was incredibly encouraging.

Grateful to be part of this global conversation, and excited for what’s ahead as XR becomes more accessible, practical, and creator-driven.

Read the full blog:

Mixel Studio recently took the global stage at IEEE VR 2026 in Daegu, Korea, where our founder served as a tutorial instructor alongside experts from Google, Yale School of Medicine, and University College London. The session focused on designing authorable mixed reality systems and, more importantl...

02/12/2026

Honored to share that we’ve been accepted into the Michigan Founders Fund Pre-Accelerator powered by gener8tor (Winter 2026 cohort).

Over the next few months, I’ll be working closely with experienced mentors, operators, and investors to sharpen our strategy, accelerate traction, and build a strong foundation for long-term growth.

We’re building the “Canva + Zoom” for spatial learning & training, it turns scarce engineering expertise into scalable, guided experiences through no-code authoring and live session orchestration. Universities, innovation centers, and workforce programs use OXR to build immersive lessons and interactive training in-house without hiring developers or agencies. If you’re in engineering or technical workforce training and interested in a partnership, pilot, or strategic collaboration, I’d love to connect.

Teamwork makes the dream work - let's keep building this together Chiao Lin, Anhua Wu, Ting Lu, and Tiger Zhang !

Grateful to the Michigan Founders Fund and gener8tor teams, especially Program Manager Brittni Abiolu, for the opportunity! Excited for what’s ahead.

Special thanks to the institutions that have supported our journey:
Ann Arbor SPARK
Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurship
University of Michigan - School of Information
University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education

Attend Our Founder Showcase on Thursday, March 26 in Detroit.
Register Here: https://lnkd.in/guaJZmnZ

Press Release/Blog in the comment

02/07/2026

We’re happy to collaborate with Kamran M. Mirza, M.D., Ph.D. , a leading educator in pathology education at Michigan Medicine.

Exploring how extended reality (XR) can be used to support learning and teaching in medical education—through instructor-led XR video lectures built with OXR—has been a great experience for our team, and an exciting step toward more immersive, accessible medical education.

We are currenlty looking for UM students studying pre-med, please share this with them! Sign-up link in the comments.

11/24/2025

In early November, we ran Design Jam 2.0 at the University of Michigan School of Information, an intensive, fast-paced mini-program where students tackled real-world challenges and pitched complete solutions in just one week.

Despite the tight timeline, every team delivered a polished 6-minute pitch with thoughtful design decisions, storytelling, and prototypes. We were blown away by the energy, collaboration, and creativity the students brought into the room.

What stood out most wasn’t just the quality of the work: it was the students’ hunger for real-world, high-impact problems to solve. Many reached out afterward sharing how meaningful the experience was:

“Awesome opportunity to learn about entrepreneurship and startups. It was really insightful!”
“It felt very different from other lectures, very real and useful.”
“Honestly, I feel like I could build a much more mature product now that I know how to approach it correctly. Thank you again for giving back to UMSI!”

The feedback was loud and clear:
- students want more hands-on, long-term experiential learning, especially in XR design, healthcare challenges, and working directly with partners like Mott Children’s Hospital.
- 75% rated 7/7 interest in joining a future semester-long XR course that builds on this momentum.

Mixel started with a small group of developers and designers who wanted to bring XR for good, and throughout our journey we’ve built several projects with JJ and brought them into the Mott Arcade. We’ve always believed these meaningful, human-centered experiences should be shared with students who are learning to design the future. That’s why we’re excited to continue this work with UMSI students, and it’s been incredibly encouraging to see so many of them share the same curiosity, empathy, and drive to use XR to create real impact.

Contribution Acknowledgment:
This program was made possible through the collaborative efforts of Chiao Lin and Anhua Wu from Mixel Studio, Inc., who prepared the full programming and learning materials; J.J. Bouchard from C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, who shared his expertise as a patient technologist and introduced students to the technologies used at Mott; and Angie Zill, MS from University of Michigan School of Informations Engagement & Learning Office, who coordinated logistics and helped facilitate the event from start to finish.