[1] The $115 million facility[2] opened in January 2013 and is best known for its architecture and technological integration, including a large robotic book storage and retrieval system which houses most of the university's engineering, textiles, and hard sciences collections.

[10] When the project's budget was cut by $11 million during the Great Recession, the bookBot was one of several innovations to emerge, enabling architects to design a smaller building without sacrificing seating.

[14] 31% of building materials are made from recycled content, most of its wood comes from sustainable forests, and the interior makes extensive use of solar energy and natural light.

Additional features include a roof-mounted solar water heater, low-flow fixtures, and a partial green roof.

[17][18] The "core" of the university's vision for the Hunt Library is "the ability for our students, faculty, and partners to immerse themselves in interactive computing, multimedia creation, and large-scale visualization.

Visitors can watch the bookBot retrieve materials through a glass wall on the first floor of the library, called Robot Alley.

A virtual browse tool aims to replicate the aid to discovery that physical library shelves provide by presenting sets of adjacently indexed titles.

The lab is further equipped with a Sennheiser K-array 5.1 surround sound system with BiAmp AudiaFlex audio processing, a custom, liquid-cooled game server with dual NVIDIA GTX 690 graphics cards and with an overclocked Intel i7 quad-core processor with 256 GB SSD, 32 GB memory and 10Ge Ethernet.

Gamers have access to a Mac Pro game and visualization server, three fixed consoles (an Xbox One, a PlayStation 4 and a Wii U), a Samsung Blu-ray disc player, AppleTV, Cisco digital media player, Vista Spyder Video Wall Processor, Extron XTP Crosspoint matrix switcher and three mobile game carts with Xbox, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

The ultra high-definition displays are made with Christie MicroTiles technology and range in size from 3.2 to 6.5 meters wide.