Multisensory Storytelling in Virtual Reality and Original Flavor Reality

Just a friendly heads up for this class: Unreal Engine experience is necessary because it is our primary tool for both creating and experiencing projects during the semester. If you don’t have a solid understanding by September 2026 you will likely fall behind and it won’t be as fun 🙂

In this course, we will explore how to create immersive narratives that leverage our full suite of senses like touch, taste and smell as well as lesser-known ones like space, time, balance and scale. We will dig into the history of experiential storytelling, starting from immersive theater and Smell-O-vision to cutting-edge haptics and mind-bending illusions of proprioception. To help center this back in practical applications, we will also explore how this evolving art is commonly used in exhibition design, experiential marketing and brick and mortar retail. The class will be a healthy mixture of game theory and experience-based learning (meaning there will be field trips and many multisensory VR projects to explore).
Some AI tools will commonly be taught and implemented. I strongly encourage their use on the production side, not the creative side. 

We will dig into the process of making the immersive experiences Forager (SXSW, NAB, SIGGRAPH) and Tree VR ( Sundance, Tribeca, TED), looking at both the project files and all the work that went into ideation and pre-production. 
All of this will culminate in a show exhibiting all your final projects in the Media Commons ballroom.