Characteristics
- Course: Virtual and Augmented Reality for Good (VAR4Good)
- Programme: organised by Bachelor's programme in Informatica, but open to all students
- Group size: 50 students
- Study load: 6 EC
- Year: third-year Bachelor's students
Course description
In the course "Virtual and Augmented Reality for Good" (VAR4Good), students learn to develop a virtual or augmented reality experience that addresses a challenge with a clear societal relevance. VR/AR is known as a gaming medium by many, but in this course, we teach students that it has great value for challenges that are too dangerous, impossible, counterproductive or too expensive to solve in real life. Building good VR/AR experiences is a multidisciplinary activity that benefits from the skills of storytellers, graphics artists, designers and programmers, therefore this course welcomes students with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds. Collaboration between the students is vital to come to a good final product, therefore collaboration is graded separately. During the course, students have regular access to VR headsets and other facilities in the Visualisation Lab at Science Park. Students use online tutorials to learn about VR application development in Unity, the software development environment used in this course. Distributed development on the same project is supported by cloud-based software repository systems. The end result is presented using a short video (see link below) and a live demonstration of the VR experience.
Virtual and Augmented Reality will replace many communication media that we currently take for granted. This course prepares students for that future.Rob Belleman