Immersive Technologies - Transforming Society Through Digital Innovation

Catalog description

Immersive technologies are an emerging field. Although envisioned and available for several decades, technological challenges of the past made their application in education, research, and everyday life a rather specialized endeavor, restricted to research labs rather than being open to communities. This is changing with the advent of consumer grade VR headsets offered essentially by every major tech company and smartphones becoming devices to augment any physical reality. We refer to these technologies as xR as they comprise everything from augmented to virtual reality. This development is occurring at an incredible pace and is opening new opportunities for the integration of this technology into every aspect of human life. xR is revolutionizing how humans communicate, how we experience spatially and temporally remote places, how we are able to view, understand, and analyze data, and how we train people. Instead of interacting with data on a 2D desktop screen, researchers and decision makers can immerse themselves in virtual environments where geospatial data are represented in intuitive, immersive, and flexible ways. In parallel to developments in xR we are witnessing an incredible increase in creating content for immersive experiences; with the ready availability of massive amounts of environmental data (e.g., LiDAR) and efficient 3D modeling technologies (e.g., SketchUp, CityEngine), realistic immersive scenarios are easier to create than ever before. We are seeing a paradigm shift which enables new methods of environmental decision making from urban planning to climate change. The combination of xR and automated 3D modeling enables models of real-world places to be integrated within data visualization workbenches. This course will provide students with the basics of what xR technologies are and what their history is, it will connect xR to recent developments in 3D modeling and environmental sensing as two sides of the same coin in that one is focusing on content creation and the other on accessing content. The course will theoretically address what the key features of xR are and introduce students to core concepts such as immersion, presence, and reality-trade off. Furthermore, the course will provide students with hands on experiences to create their own xR experiences focusing on entry level technologies such as 360 cameras, modeling using SketchUp, photogrammetry techniques such as structure from motion mapping, and Unity, a game engine flexible to cater to a broad range of needs.