CS 410/510 Top: Virtual Reality

Credit Hours:

4/3

Course Coordinator:

Ehsan Aryafar

Course Description:

This is an introductory course to virtual reality. Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to understand the fundamentals of development of virtual reality worlds, including mathematical basis of motion and physics in VR worlds, human visual perception, design practices to enable immersive experiences for users, and development on heterogeneous device hardware. The course also contains a final project where students develop their own VR worlds based on the design practices discussed during the course.

Prerequisites:

We will use the Unity software framework to create VR worlds and games. Unity engine offers a primary scripting in C#. Students are expected to either be familiar with C# or be able to quickly pick up scripting in C# (we cover the basics). Also, the course contains a few lab based classes. Students are expected to have access to a laptop that can run basic unity and that they can bring it to class during the lab sessions. We will provide instructions on how to freely download unity and develop software with that later in the course.

Goals:

Upon the successful completion of this class, students will be able to:

1. Explain the current hardware and software trends that are used to build VR systems.
2. Analyze the geometry of virtual worlds.
3. Explain how VR translation, orientation, and rotation is done through matrix transformations.
4. Explain the properties of light and lenses.
5. Explain fundamentals of VR position tracking through both internal and external sensors.

Textbooks:

1. "Virtual Reality" by Steven M. Lavalle