GEN1000 Perspectives on General Education / Subject to Instructor’s Discretion
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This course provides students with an understanding of virtual reality and its application to the society. The principles of the virtual reality, augmented reality and multimedia technologies and their applications to the community and business operations environment will be introduced. Through a combination of lectures, class discussion, hands-on demos and exercises, in-depth topic presentations, and diverse readings from the current literature, students will be exposed to a wide range of stimulating and inspirable cross-disciplinary research in the broadlydefined fields of virtual and augmented reality, 3D user interaction and spatial user interfaces.
Upon completion of this module, students should be able to:
a. explain how virtual reality can benefit the business and community upon understanding the history, development and applications of virtual reality;
b. integrate the knowledge, skills and tools required in the field of virtual reality and multimedia technologies;
c. apply virtual reality and related multimedia technologies in solving problems and issues encountered in business and community in the society;
d. Investigate and appreciate the current applications, development trends and opportunities in virtual and augmented reality in various domains, for example, product design, terminal operations, cultural preservation, financial analysis and game development.
1. Introduction to Virtual Reality
1.1 Fundamental concepts and history of virtual reality and augmented reality
1.2 Immersion and interactivity of virtual reality
1.3 Accessories and equipment
2. Impact of Virtual Reality to the society
2.1 Role of virtual reality in human civilisation
2.2 Sociological, cultural and ethical impact
2.3 Impact on science and technology development
3. Basic concepts in 3D Virtual Reality model building
3.1 Concepts on perception modalities, space and time
3.2 Principles of 2D and 3D user-interfaces
3.3 Concepts of texturing, lighting and particle system
4. Developing Virtual Reality scenes
4.1 Assets, pictures, video and audio import
4.2 3D scenes and object building
4.3 Virtual reality animation and visual editing
5. Interactive features and character setup
5.1 Unity physics and motions
5.2 Player controller and 3D object control concept
5.3 Character setup and interactions
6. Virtual Reality devices integration
6.1 Accessories, equipment, software, hardware and user-interface
6.2 Mobile devices set up
6.3 Build and export virtual reality
7. Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE)
7.1 Fundamental concepts and types of CAVE
7.2 Appreciation of CAVE applications
7.3 Conversion of 3D virtual reality scenes and interaction setup in CAVE
8. Application development in Virtual Reality
8.1 Education, language, cultural preservation and entertainment
8.2 Business, finance, healthcare and medical support
8.3 Multidisciplinary applications
9. Future of Virtual Reality
9.1 Trends in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality
9.2 Development trends in hardware, software and applications
9.3 Integration of virtual reality with robotics and big data analytics
1. Class Participation (10%)
2. Assignment (30%)
3. Test (30%)
4. Group Project (30%)
1. Smith, M., & Queiroz, C. (2015). Unity 5. x Cookbook. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing Ltd.*
2. Parisi, T. (2015). Learning Virtual Reality: Developing Immersive Experiences and Applications for Desktop, Web, and Mobile. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.*
3. Linowes, J. (2015). Unity Virtual Reality Projects. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing Ltd.
4. Jerald, J. (2015). The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality. Waterloo, US: Morgan & Claypool.
5. Mauricio De La Orta (2016). Virtual Reality: How to Experience and Create Amazing VR Content. Eduvea.
6. Hale, K. S., & Stanney, K. M. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook of virtual environments: Design, implementation, and applications. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
