Rui Pereira
Magic windows that allow us to peek into different realities without leaving our physical space, lenses that reveal hidden layers of objects or navigating new universes within the same room. More than ever, mobile devices are getting a humanscale understanding of space and motion allowing us to create more intimate interactions with our surrounding spaces, leveraging them as a canvas to experience other realities. We now have the potential to give life to inanimate objects, tell stories through space, customizing private views of public spaces and recognize places we’ve never been.
We’ll question what it means and how can we blend reality exploring themes such as: augmented space and new paradigms in social interaction, public space and privacy; storytelling and navigating the physical space like turning pages in a book; tangible interfaces, mixed objects and animism; Magic windows, xray vision, timemachines and impossible universes; Far away so close: telepresence and remote collaboration
The course will survey the past, current and up and coming technologies and experiences in Mixed Reality including environmental augmented reality and interactive projection mapping, handheld devices while fostering a strong user experience perspective on the affordances and constraints of each. We’ll research and discuss the design principles and guidelines for creating mixed reality experiences focusing on the links between real and virtual objects, interaction space and asymmetries between physical and digital worlds, environmental semantics and multimodal and tangible interaction.
Technologies explored will be focusing on mobile platforms (phones, tablets) including Vuforia, SLAM, image and object recognition, depth sensing, projection mapping.
Unity3D will be the development platform: students must have previous working knowledge of Unity3D and feel comfortable with independently developing using this platform.
A working knowledge of Unity3D may be gained by going through the Unity 5 3D Essential Training Lynda Course prior to the course (log in to Lynda for free via https://www.nyu.edu/lynda).
Students will create and develop ideas through sketches and functional prototypes for each of the weekly themes (see calendar below).
Students should feel free and are invited to use any other technologies they might find suitable to develop their ideas.