syllabus

Virtual Reality Software Review

In a collaborative group effort, this course will create a wiki that reviews the current state of software for creating virtual and augmented reality artifacts.  We will target three software uses: entertainment, education, and science.  We will investigate the capapilities of software for head-mounted displays (HMDs), big-metal displays like caves and the yurt, and, as a baseline, desktop displays.  We will consider software at different levels of the stack including graphics and visualization libraries, prototype application frameworks, game engines, and stand-alone applications.  Software evaluation will include web research, hands-on case studies, and surveying.

After this course students will be able to:

   1) articulate software tool goals, requirements, and capabities;

   2) construct meaningful evaluation strategies for software libraries, frameworks, and applications; strategies include surveys, interviews, comparative use, case studies, and web research;

   3) execute tool evaluation strategies;

   4) comparatively analyze software tools based on evaluation;

   5) produce some virtual reality

We will begin the semester by taking stock of candidates for software and hardware.  Understanding and codifying their claimed capabilities will guide the choice of a subset for closer study.  Each student will pick from subset, designing a tutorial that others in the class will subsequently work through.  Through both the design and execution of the tutorials, we will gather deeper knowledge of the benefits and costs of the tools.

In addition to hands-on evaluation, we will collectively create a survey to circulate on the web to gather evaluative information from VR users, software developers, and hardware developers.

At each stage we will document our findings and analysis in a wiki.  One goal for the wiki is to help VR developers to choose wisely in creating their virtual realities.  A second is to identify gaps in available software and thus to nudge the development of future software to fill those gaps.  At some point the wiki will go live, possibly after submission as a research paper, if appropriate.

Evaluation in the class will be as follows

  15% class attendance and participation

 10% initial search contributions to wiki

 15% survey design, creation, collection, and analysis contributions

 20% tutorial quality

 10% tutorial results analysis

 15% weekly journal (1/2 page) of activities and findings

 15% overall final wiki contributions

Over 14 weeks students will spend 3 hour per week in class (42 hours total) and an average of 10 hours per week on homework, as described above (140 hours).

LOOSE PREREQUISITES

There are probably a number of different skills that will be helpful for this course:

• practice with software downloading and installation on linux and/or windows

• experience with a game engine

• 3D modeling and/or animation

• software testing, evaluation, and documentation

• software engineering like cs32 or cs33

• computer graphics, like cs123 and/or cs224

• human-computer interaction, like Jeff's HCI class

This list is not exhaustive, and it's unlikely anyone would have all the listed skills.  But if you don't have any of them, it may be difficult to participate and contribute.