Virtual Worlds

Catalog description

The world can be thought of as a work of carefully assembled, organized and presented pieces of fiction that intimately intersect with our own beliefs and experiences. This course will embrace this notion and push forward this suspension of disbelief by architecting and constructing unique virtual histories in the Unity game engine. How can we pick, lay out and program texts, images, films, objects, spaces and procedures to persuade a virtual visitor of the coherence of our world? How can we combine mythical and physical components in a 3D digital medium to turn imaginative spaces into believable places? Drawing on fictional texts, museography, environmental storytelling and procedural rhetoric, this class will explore how we can build untold accounts, alternate realities and possible future worlds.