he virtual expansion of screens began during the 1960’s with the exploration of head-mounted displays. Since the 60’s, virtual reality has been explored in a multi-disciplinary context including philosophy, design, arts, behavioral therapy. Baudrillard, with his publication of Simulacra and Simulation (1981), declared that human experience is being replaced by a simulation of reality (HyperReality). His theories brought the dystopian narrative of the virtual to mainstream pop-culture, as seen in films such as The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix . Contrary to Baudrillard, Canadian VR Pioneer Char Davies brings a more positive perspective to Virtual Reality, “facilitating a temporary release from our haitial perceptions and culturally biased assumptions about being in the world, to enable us, however momentarily, to perceive ourselves and the world us freshly.” Throughout the class, the friction between Baudrillard and Davies will create the foundation of our exploration of Virtual Reality, where we will use room scale headsets and game engines to create meaningful “temporal experiences” exploring themes from behavioral sciences to narrative storytelling. We will be exploring ● existing VR projects, popular culture references and theory. ● concepts such as sense of embodiment (SoE), social VR design, and interactive storytelling techniques. ● methods for designing, modeling and rigging avatars for VR. ● live and pre-recorded animation. ● spatial audio techniques such as ambisonic sounds engines. ● packaging and distributing applications for social VR. This is a production class, along with a theoretical foundation, in which we will prototype projects with networking, inverse kinematics, raycasting and face tracking technologies to explore questions such as “how does the viewer become part of the experience?” and “how does the real space relate to the virtual worlds we design?” In the second half of the class, students will work in groups to build a final social VR project based on their exploration of the above framework.

Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 11 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2020)

ITPG-GT 2461-000 (22642)09/08/2020 – 11/24/2020 Tue3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by Nassima, Igal