The Oregon Reality Lab

Immersive Media Track Courses

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Below is a list of the required courses as well as those we have offered in the past as electives. We are continually updating our curriculum and elective options, so check with your program director or advisor for questions and to learn more.

 

Foundations in Immersive Media (4 credits, offered in fall term): Students explore the uses of social virtual worlds as well as augmented and virtual reality through the strategic lens of communications (marketing, advertising, branding) and community building. Students will develop a proposal for an issue or organization that uses mediated reality to engage audiences for strategic outcomes, recognizing limitations and providing recommendations to overcome those limitations.  

 

User Experience and Design (4 credits, offered in winter term): This hands-on course is designed to teach fundamental principles of user experience (UX) and human-centered design (HCD) in the context of strategic communication. This course is heavily interdisciplinary in nature, relying on various theoretical and applied approaches drawn from fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), media psychology, and many others. UX is also context-specific, and we will be highlighting UX design in various domains, including mobile apps, traditional web, service and customer experience, gaming, and product design, among others. This course will strengthen your ability to identify and understand universal principles of UX design, conduct basic UX research that produces culturally relevant insight, and begin to translate that insight into testable, research-driven UX design solutions specific to a product/service.

 

Creating in Unity (2 credits, offered in spring term): In this course, students get an introduction to the tools used for designing and building for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences and more broadly, the Metaverse. They will work with the game engine Unity to design their first interactive VR scene and AR building software to create mobile augmented visuals. Students explore off the shelf resources to get them started quickly and gain an understanding of the overall production pipeline for generating content for immersive spaces. This course sets the foundation for future building classes, where students examine the steps needed to create custom objects and environments for their original ideas. **No prior building experience necessary** Prerequisite - Foundations in Immersive Media

 

Building for Immersive Media (4 credits, offered in fall term): In this course, students get an introduction to the production pipeline for creating custom content for immersive and interactive media. They will gain hands-on experience utilizing cross-platform workflows and production software, to bring your original ideas to life. This course focuses on 3D modeling, texturing, and lighting for real-time rendering environments. Note – these skills are transferable to film and advertising. This is a hands-on course with an emphasis on understanding industry standard technology used to build content for immersive and interactive experiences. By the end of this term, you should be able to: work with and understand 3D production software and their role in the construction of immersive and interactive content, create basic models (High to Low Poly workflow) with proper topology and understanding of optimization and performance pitfalls, design virtual Computer-Generated assets and be able to publish them to AR compatible mobile devices as well as computer driven applications for interactive experiences, have a foundational understanding of the production pipeline used in creating content for interactive applications, understand how modeled and textured assets are integrated into real-time rendering engines, understand and be able to implement functionality through basic scripts. **No coding experience required ** Prerequisites - Foundations in Immersive Media, Creating for Immersive

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Production with Unreal Engine (2 credits, offered in winter term): In this course students will work with comparable production applications like Unreal Engine, to develop VR scenes used for storytelling and visualization. The technical focuses of the course include setting up VR functionality, basic interactions and triggers, high dynamic lighting and working with material graphs to generate visually compelling environments. Additionally, this course will examine alternative ways to generate models using scanning techniques and incorporating PBR materials using Megascans. Prerequisites - Foundations in Immersive Media, Creating for Immersive, Building for Immersive Media

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Elective Options

Photogrammetry for Immersive (2 credits): Photogrammetry is a technique used for creating CG (computer-generated) content through a series of photographs. In this course, students will be introduced to this process and will learn industry standard methods and software for optimizing these assets for use in real-time rendering environments. Prerequisites - None (recommended: Creating for Immersive, Building for Immersive Media)

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360 Video (2 credits): This is an experiential learning class, in which students will produce 360-video content. We will use Insta360, GoPro and Yi cameras, and students will learn professional post-production workflow including Mistaka VR and Premiere Pro. On certain dates, we will convene at UO Portland and travel by van or caravan to a location for shooting (weather dependent).

 

 

Course titles offered within each “topic” will vary, and many of our electives include experiential learning. Elective courses are repeatable when the topics have different titles, for a total of 16 or more credits. Electives offered may include topics such as: 

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• Data Analytics

• Project Management using XR (Agile/Scrum)

• XR Data Visualization 

• Entrepreneurship 

• Game Engine Coding 

• Digital Identities 

• Tech Communication

• Artificial Intelligence

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