When not developing award-winning games, William Chyr, adjunct professor of instruction, teaches graduate students at Columbia College Chicago about the games industry and how music intersects with interactive media.

William Chyr, an adjunct professor of instruction at Columbia College Chicago’s Music Composition for the Screen graduate program, recently earned accolades at the 29th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, taking home the award for Immersive Reality Technical Achievement for his studio’s virtual reality (VR) game “Hotel Infinity.”  
  
The D.I.C.E. Awards recognize games, individuals, and development teams that have contributed to the advancement of the multi-billion-dollar worldwide entertainment software industry. 
 
“This is incredible,” says Kubi Uner, director of the Music Composition for Screen MFA program at Columbia, which was again named the No. 1 music program in the world by “The Hollywood Reporter” in 2025. “The D.I.C.E. Awards are one of the most important awards in the games industry, as they are presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and are the only peer-based awards — nominees are voted on by the 33,000 members of the academy.” 

For Chyr, the winning moment was a surprise.  

“I wasn’t expecting to win at all; I didn’t even have a speech prepared,” he says. “But it’s a huge honor.” 

From Installation Artist to Award-Winning Game Designer  
  
Chyr’s professional journey to the award stage began in the world of contemporary art, where Chyr created large-scale installations before turning to game development in 2012. What he thought would be a short experiment became a seven-year project, culminating in his first critically acclaimed title “Manifold Garden.”  
  
“That really changed things and opened up a lot of doors,” he says.  
  
From there, his company, Studio Chyr, grew into a collaborative team (including Columbia alum Jacob Mooney '13),, eventually partnering with Meta and Sony to develop “Hotel Infinity,” a VR experience inspired by the mathematical thought experiment of Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel Paradox.   
  
“Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and every single room is occupied,” Chyr says in explaining the paradox. “At first glance, it seems impossible to fit any new guests. But since the hotel is infinite, you can ask each guest to move down one room, and that leaves the first room vacant.”  
  
“While the concept challenges everyday intuition about space and capacity, the game ‘Hotel Infinity’ becomes something you can actually walk through, turning an abstract mathematical idea into a physical, immersive experience,” Chyr explains.   
  
The game’s defining feature is its room-scale physical locomotion system, which uses portals and redirection to create the illusion of walking through impossible spaces while physically remaining within a small real-world area.   
  
“You physically walk through the environments,” Chyr says. “The experience of playing the game is you’re moving through an impossibly large hotel seamlessly, while in reality you’re walking in circles.”  
  
Chyr believes that the innovation of blending physics, architecture, and immersive design helped the game stand out.   
  
“We made a game centered entirely around this fairly novel form of locomotion in VR,” he says.  
  
The Intersection of Game Design and Music Composition 
 
Since 2022, Chyr has brought his VR savvy into the Columbia classroom, helping screen composers in Columbia’s MFA program understand how interactive media are produced, and the role music plays in them.   
 
“I’ve been wanting to teach for some time,” he says. “When I saw that there was an opening, I thought, this seemed like a good class to get started in.” 

In his class, students don’t just learn theory; they gain insight into real-world workflows, industry roles, and emerging technologies. In fact, Chyr gave students a behind-the-scenes look at “Hotel Infinity” while it was still in development, offering a rare glimpse into a major project in progress. 
 
As his students move quickly into professional roles, Chyr sees the impact of his work firsthand. And now, with an internationally recognized VR title to his name — in addition to his prior success with the video game “Manifold Garden" — Chry not only brings his experience to the classroom but also a proven track record of developing popular, high-quality VR and video games. 
 

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