Syllabus

In a collaborative group effort, this course will search out, install, test, and critically evaluate VR software that supports data visualization for researchers.  We will target several specific types of data, including volumetric data, and remote sensing data.  We will investigate the capabilities of software for head-mounted displays (HMDs), big-metal displays like caves and the yurt, and, as a baseline, desktop displays.  Software evaluation will include web research, hands-on case studies, and surveying.  Results will be documented in a courses wiki.


After this course students will be able to:


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.  The wiki is live with results from a related 2018 class.


Evaluation in the class will be as follows:


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