This year, we have seen our social lives thrust online: holidays with family, parties with friends and live performances have all been arranged (with varying degrees of success) into 2D grids of video feeds through platforms such as Zoom and Google Meet. What happens when we break out of this grid and explore new forms of real-time interaction online using webcam video and audio? In this course, students will create a series of experimental interactive spaces that try to answer these questions: How can we design for open-ended collaboration? For play? For the connectedness of a live performance? Students will be exposed to a series of open source Javascript tools for arranging live webcam video and audio in 2D and 3D space in the browser: WebRTC and WebGL (through the THREE.js library). Guests will include theater artists working in the digital realm, game designers, and technologists trying to make the online world more like the best parts of the world around us.

Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate) 2 credits - 8 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2022)