FOCUS: Virtual Realities
Virtual Realities: Visualizations, Imagined Worlds, and Games (last offered Fall 2009)
Within the past half century, a powerful new paradigm has emerged in the ways in which we produce and consume information. The idea of an immersive “virtual reality” space for intellectual inquiry and exploration encompasses education, engineering, industry, and the arts. While the idea of a virtual reality goes back to the earliest human storytelling and pictorial practices, technology has helped established these in increasingly flexible forms. Fueled by decades of growth in computational processing power, these new modes of knowing are transforming the foundations of the arts, sciences, and humanities by providing new experimental, rhetorical, and experiential interfaces to information.
Students in the Virtual Realities Focus take two of the four courses listed below, plus participate in the collective Interdisciplinary Discussion Course once a week. The cluster is highly collaborative and project oriented, and welcomes students from all academic backgrounds and interests (humanities, sciences, engineering). No gaming or programming experience required, though gamers and programmers are welcome!
Click here to view the Virtual Realities cluster on The Focus Program website.
For Virtual Realities faculty and students: click here to view the cluster's blog.
ISIS 110FCS: Authoring Digital Media: The Victorian Crystal Palace and Virtual Exhibition Spaces
Victoria Szabo
TTh 2:50-4:05 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101
- How can online, 3d virtual environments function as exhibition spaces for art, cultural objects, and historical narratives? What can creating a virtual exhibition space teach us about creating real life exhibitions, museums, and gallery spaces? How can creating a virtual exhibit space teach us to understand history and culture in new ways? This course will explore these questions through hands-on work creating a digital media enriched 3d virtual world version of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World’s Fair. The Exhibition was held in London in the famous Crystal Palace, a magnificent glass structure that was a marvel in its own right. The exhibits inside showcased then-modern arts, technology, and design (many of the exhibit objects live on in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London). What parallels can we draw between the Victorian Crystal Palace exhibition and our desires today to collect and display information and objects in virtual and online environments? In order to address this question, we will also visit contemporary museums, online galleries, and virtual environments in order to understand better the relationships between real and the virtual world settings for exhibits. Course texts will include sources such as newspapers, journals, fiction, film, visual art and games, as well as historical, theoretical and critical work about both the Victorian period and contemporary technocultures. Students will write short essays and produce final, collaborative multimedia projects. No specific technical skills required; we welcome participants with diverse background and experiences into this project-based course (thematically-oriented). Open to students in Focus program only. (ALP, STS--status pending)
ISIS 170FCS: Constructing Immersive Virtual Worlds
Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill
T 4:40-7:15 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101
- This course explores the 3D user interface as meta-media container of audio/video/text/simulations. We will discuss the philosophies and construction of synthetic virtual worlds – thinking about them both in terms of gaming metaphors and as mainstream social/meeting spaces. Our case study will be the OpenCroquet project, which is housed at Duke and directed by the course instructors. Students will consider practical issues in creating 3D spaces, artifacts and avatars as well as study the evolution of computer user interfaces. Other topics will include: programming paradigms to support scalable persistent synthetic worlds; self-organizing communities; software architecture and economics of immersive worlds; mixed reality systems – including integrating the real into the virtual. We will also examine the idea of the avatars as a representation of the self by considering online social systems; patterns of behavior, misbehavior and norms; and issues of anonymity and identity. (QS) (production-oriented) Open to students in Focus program only. (QS)
CLST 85FCS.01: Good and Evil in Imagined Worlds
Clare Woods
TTh 10:05-11:20 AM, Location: Allen 226
- Students explore the ancient and medieval underpinnings of popular virtual-world building tropes around good and evil as found in video games, films, and novels. What pre-modern texts underlie the persistent connection between fantasy/sci-fi and our contemporary cultural practices? This course aims in part to introduce students to the ancient and medieval texts that constitute the primary sources for our knowledge of pre-modern mythical and imaginary worlds. With this grounding in place, students will explore how modern societies "consume" the past, rework it and remodel it through various media – video game, film and novel – for contemporary audiences. Students will be confronted with texts written millennia ago, which still hold meaning and relevance to contemporary society, and will continue to do so long into the future. What about these texts has ensured their longevity? In our own age of ephemeral entertainment, and rapidly evolving technologies, why do we still borrow from these pre-modern sources, and what meanings are generated when we do? What elements of these texts lend themselves to the contemporary imagination and new media forms? The students will be challenged to consider whether the work created today – the work they themselves create in the course of their careers – stands a similar chance of remaining influential and resonant millennia from now. (thematically-oriented) Open to students in Focus program only.
VISUALST 192FCS.01 / ISIS 108FCS.01 / FVD 137.01: Virtual Form and Space
Raquel Salvatella de Prada
Th 11:40 AM-2:20 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101
- Students confront the digital world from the perspective of the transformation of physical artifacts to digital form. Students will discover that effective visual representation of data requires an understanding of human perception, visualization and computer graphics techniques, investigating along the way the inherent and complex decision-making that such transformations entail. Students will explore the basic principles of perception such as lightness, brightness, contrast, constancy, color theory, and visual attention. Current visualization techniques in volume rendering, surface rendering, the use of glyphs, and animation are presented, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and visual artifacts. Students are taught the process of transforming raw data into information structures through inspection, filtering, and segmentation techniques. Significant laboratory component with area field trips(production-oriented). Open to students in Focus program only. Visit the Art, Art History & Visual Studies website. (ALP)
FOCUS 99FCS.12: Special Topics in Focus: Virtual Realities
(the Interdisciplinary Discussion Course or "IDC")
Richard Lucic and Victoria Szabo
M 5:30-7:00 PM, Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101
- In this course, students and faculty, working together, have the opportunity to synthesize the information they are learning and to make new connections between the technologies of gaming, simulation, and visualization, on the one hand, and their cultural and social manifestations, on the other. The course provides the freedom to explore virtual environments such as Croquet and SecondLife, as well as play interactive games; to visit with practicing game developers and media artists; to watch and interpret films in which gaming and simulation play prominent parts; and to discuss in a relaxed setting the implications of these media to perceptions of reality and world-building. The course also features presentations and demonstrations of new and emerging technology tools by people who are conceiving and building them. Open to students in Focus program only.