(first taught in Spring 2013)
Course Description
In this project-based course, you will use an immersion framework to design, create, and evaluate immersive virtual environments and the interaction between the user and the virtual environment. To do this, we will combine hands-on fundamentals with interaction, animation, and immersive virtual reality design and theoretical and research concerns. Your project will serve to both motivate and implement/showcase these aspects. The course will culminate in a final interactive project showcase and project pitch (oral/video) of your team project.
see SFU’s Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on my first offering of this course in 2013, entitled: “How a SIAT course in immersive environments exposed students to the real world”
Course Objectives, Learning Goals & Outcomes
In this course, you will learn and be prepared to:
- Examine the history and conceptual frameworks surrounding “immersion” and “immersiveness” and what this means for digital immersive environments and their users.
- Apply a conceptual framework in relation to your own immersive project/experience and use it to critique other immersive projects.
- Demonstrate moderate proficiency using appropriate software (currently: Unity) to design and build interactive (including user interaction and animation) immersive 3D virtual environments and experiences and display them on off-the-shelf computational devices/displays such as head-mounted displays (HMDs). Be able to present and explain your project and underlying code to others, and explain/defend your design decisions and how they are based on relevant frameworks/theories.
- Reflect on and apply suitable agile processes and team-based, collaborative practices used in VR experience design including ideation, project goal-setting and scoping, prototyping, iterative revisions, user testing/evaluating, and critical reflection as the base for an iterative and collaborative VR design cycle. This includes finding ways to effectively address challenges that can occur in team-based environments while being respectful and constructive. (This could include collaboratively resolving challenges that commonly occur in team-based projects, such as balancing between leading/following, communication challenges, conflicts that arise, ensuring all team members contribute meaningfully, engaging all team members, ensuring all care for the project and each other, getting people on the same page, and figuring out a shared vision/purpose that all can care about).
- Argue how this effectively takes advantage of the unique affordance of immersive VR to foster user experiences that would otherwise be impossible (or not as easily accessible), to impact users’ emotions, cognition/perspective and/or behavior in a positive direction
What’s in it for you?
You will learn how to design, build, and iteratively refine an immersive and interactive VR experience that should blow the user away and positively affect them in a meaningful way. To do this, you will use the popular Unity 3D game engine and guidance from an immersion framework. You will most likely be implementing this for head-mounted displays so you’ll be able to showcase it wherever you go – including your next job interview and your next party. Combining a public project showcase with an executive summary and a final project video can further improve your resume/portfolio and marketability.
Summer 2021 offering (online):
Impact: Using immersive experience design to contribute to meaningful solutions to real-world challenges. That is: what is a topic that you (and your team) care very deeply about that would help create a better world? A topic you care about so deeply about that it might be worth making a purposeful/transformative immersive VR experience out of it?
Impact: VR4Good IAT 445 Project showcase, Thursday June 24th at 10:30
on Thursday June 24th from 10:30 — 1pm, the students from my course on “immersive environments” (IAT 445) will be presenting their final projects, live-streamed and accessible to everyone with an internet connection
Draft Schedule:
- 10:30am: Intro, 1 min VR pitches/trailers, and rules of play
- Ca 10:45am – 12pm noon: Moderated VR showcases and interviews with the VR designers
- Ca noon – close: Your chance to, chat, socialize, and talk to instructor/TA/students
Details to follow soon.
Spring 2020 offering:
SHIFT: VR4Good Addressing Climate Change & Consumerism: IAT 445 Project showcase
[NOTE: due to the Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing measures this showcase will happen only online, below are links to the different projects and videos.]
On Tuesday April 14th 2020, the students from my course on “immersive environments” (IAT 445) will be presenting their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 11am — 3pm.
10 student teams will showcase their own immersive Virtual Reality projects that they developed in the popular game engine Unity3D and will present using Vive Cosmos, HTC Vive, or Oculus Quest head-mounted displays.
this semester’s design challenge for students is Shift: Using immersive experience design to contribute to meaningful solutions to real-world global challenges, specifically climate change or consumerism. Specifically, you will work in a team and use Unity and the guiding frameworks from this course (e.g., immersion, presence, user-centered systems design, agile development, transformative experience design etc.) to iteratively ideate, design, prototype, and evaluate an immersive interactive VR experience that takes advantage of the unique affordances and capabilities of immersive VR experiences. You will design for user experiences that have the potential to positively shift users’ cognition/perspective and/or behavior that would otherwise be impossible (or not as easily accessible) to most users. How can you provide interesting, inspiring, or meaningful VR experiences that create a positive change in the user? That is, what experiences can you provide in VR that are otherwise difficult, dangerous, or hard to experience? Instead of using VR as a diversion and ultimate sensory overload tool to wow people, think of ways you can use it for something more interesting, novel, exciting, and meaningful. How will you go beyond traditional digital experiences and take advantage of the potential of immersive technologies/VR?
Project posters:
Projects from Spring 2020
Phoenix's Sacrifice: It only takes a small spark to incinerate a forest, but just one seed to grow a new one.
Razor: Phoenix is an adventure game in which the player is a bird escaping a forest fire with a mission to preserve the ecosystem for its future inhabitants.
Our project is a screen based computer game which takes place in a forest where a kookaburra bird struggles to escape a fire caused by a patch of grass burned by the scorching sun, a warming climate possibly due to the long term effects of human industrial activities. The kookaburra must flee for its life and join the mass escape of wildlife while carrying along a seed to bring life to a new area.
The kookaburra flies through the forest and its wings become engulfed in flames and essentially becomes a phoenix. However, when the bird reaches its destination it dies from the damage caused by the forest fire. In the end, the player’s realization sets in that the bird was actually on fire the whole time and had not turned into a phoenix.
Eden: Homecoming: As the descendant of a dying species living in the sky, humanity and what remains of a desolate earth all depends on you.
Razor: A playful and thrilling science fiction fantasy adventure puzzle game in a post apocalyptic world with the goal of re-establishing life on earth.
On desolate Earth a windstorm wipes away all living beings destroying everything in its path. However, you find what appears to be the sole surviving plant left on Earth’s soil. After waking up from the storm, you find yourself on a land away far from Earth with the plant still intact. Everything around you appears broken and in tatters. You repair the damages caused by the storm to help create a sustainable environment for the plant. Earth is slowly being purified by the new plant life developed in the sky.
Air Pollution – The Silent Killer: Act now, create more solutions, not more pollution and change the future.
Razor: Let users feel air pollution directly and immersive by making them become one of the victims
The Silent Killer is a project that spans time and space. The project envisions the future world will be affected by severely polluted air. People need to wear masks to survive and living organisms die one after another. Spectators need to play the role of people who live in 2095 and go back to the year of 2020 to improve air pollution in 2095.
The goal of the project is to lead players to improve the environment of 2095 by doing challenges in 2020. In order to achieve this, players have to sort all the garbage in 2020 in a certain amount of time. And then they will get game reward points, they can use the reward points to redeem the saplings of the tree. Besides, the saplings can be planted in the year of 2095 to help players improve the air quality in 2095. Otherwise, unsorted garbage will be sent to the garbage burning factory and produce more polluted air; and the role may died because of serious air pollution.
Waste Stranded - The Space of Forgotten Echoes: The human in us is greater than what our hands can make.
Razor: Using the latest time-travelling technology to retrieve an ecological restoration machine from the near-future, you may be the only chance Earth has before humanity’s demise.
Waste Stranded: The Space of Forgotten Echoes is a speculative experience where one travels to the near-future, before the destruction of mankind, to retrieve an ecological restoration machine back to the present with the aid of an AI audio companion. As the player experiences being in the city of the near-future, they receive flash-forwards of the destruction of earth as result of a time-travel technology glitch. They are prompted to make decisions similar to that of our present in the near-future city as well, such as voting. It is a commentary on the present illusion of safety while our earth gradually dies, and emphasizes the fact that not even the most advanced technology of our future will be able to save us if we don’t take immediate actions regarding climate change.
Terrapoint: Collaboration For The Next Generation
Razor: An adventure VR game that takes place in post-apocalyptic Earth after the wreckage of climate change and man-induced destruction — teamwork, problem-solving, and eco-friendly technological innovations are key to preserving the planet.
Terrapoint is an adventure-puzzle VR game, where the player joins a team of specialists sent by the World Restoration Commission. Their mission is to set up an experimental terraforming machine called the Tree Pod to help bring the abandoned Terrapoint District back to habitable levels. The player is equipped with a special tether gun that provides the ability to control and manipulate machines/robots in the environments, which they will need to use for traversing the hostile game world. The player’s main objective is to utilize the tether gun to reach harmful technologies, so that they can extract their energy sources and use them for powering the Tree Pod. Gameplay combines freedom of exploration and puzzle-solving mechanics, with some inspiration from action games.
Rabbit Rescue: Why are we scared of the wild, when they are the ones who should be scared of us?
Razor: You are a lost rabbit in search of your family and a new home, all the while trying to weather the harsh elements caused by climate change.
Rabbit Rescue is an action packed survival experience where you must guide a lost bunny through floods, forest fires and more. Solve puzzles, conserve resources, and dodge the deadly elements to help your rabbit survive. Follow a dramatized version of a young rabbit losing his home and family to climate change and help him find his way back.
rE-collect: Wield the technology of the future to discover where it ends up today
Razor: A scavenger hunt framed as an item collection quest with Minecraft-like mining in VR but with electronics and a linear narrative, set within the context of e-waste’s effect on the environmen
It is a VR experience where participants mine and collect materials from e-waste while they rid an environment of toxicity, so that they can perform actions that allow them to have further environmental considerations for how they personally dispose and acquire electronics.
Garbage Man: Searching for the past through the trash
Razor: A VR fetch quest, exploration game that reveals the hidden stories behind objects that were thrown into a landfill
Garbage man is a story focused collectable game where players have a list of items to find. As they find these items, each of these garbage will have a story behind why they need to be collected. These items slowly give a story about what happened to this world, why it is so garbage filled, and why your character is doing this.
Birds of a Feather: Despite your best intentions you may fall victim to the harsh outcome of your surroundings
Razor: Flock together in unity to provide food for your young in the harsh conditions that the environment provides to you.
Birds of a Feather raises awareness of garbage contaminants that pollute our natural environment beyond our normal level of acknowledgment.
To swap roles with a bird, you are overwhelmed with amazing freedom– the ability to search and forage food for yourself. Sometimes nature is forgiving, and the sources of food for survival are abundant. There are also times which food is scarcer, and despite your best intentions tragedies may occur. The user will do their best to provide nurture to their bird, which they will name at the beginning of the performance. The theme of consuming to survive will serve as a motivator for proper gameplay and nurture of the natural environment.
Eventually, the user will realize that collecting and consuming enough healthy food is impossible (more difficult each day, simulated by a timer) and if the baby eats too many pieces of garbage they will proceed to become more influenced by the sickness that the environmental contaminants provide.
Our aim is to educate players the severity of physical waste-based pollution and the effects to the species that it creates.
Players are able to see the effects of garbage, from the point of view of animal life, and experience how birds are affected by the garbage in their natural environments. We hope to attain through this experience an impact on players that makes them more aware about what we have done to our environment, with the hope that empathy influences their future decisions in the real world.
Passing Memories: Nature remembers the fate you chose
Razor: This is a puzzle game where the story and ending changes depending on how the players complete the tasks, and the ending can be flourishing and vibrant or dark and desolate based on the player’s choices
Passing Memories is a narrative game centered around travelling through memories of past environmental actions, and living with the repercussions. Our player travels through rifts in their memory, leading them towards a defining fate. Either their choices are environmentally friendly and save the environment or their choices are lazy and create environmental ruin. Either way, decisions do matter.
Showcase and Project Videos from Summer 2017 offering
On Friday June 23, 2017, the students from my course on “immersive environments” (IAT 445) presented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from 10am — 2:30pm.
9 student teams will showcase their own immersive Virtual Reality projects that they developed in the popular game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display.
Get ready to become a polar bear experiencing the aftermaths of our own decision and how it affects global warming, VR survival training while confronted with conflicting inner voices, being a synaesthete (seeing sound) in turmoil over a conflict of artistic aspirations, unraveling the mysteries of an abandoned mansion, emotionally connecting to a child’s inner world by experiencing their dreams, experiencing the loneliness of an abandoned dog first-hand/paw, and much more.
Some projects draw from contemporary indie/art computer games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema, fiction/sci-fi, and of course VR. Students were tasked to design for a purposeful and immersive user experience — this semester’s design challenge for students was Going beyond: “Use unity3D and guiding frameworks (e.g., immersion, presence, user-centered systems design etc.) to iteratively ideate, design, prototype, and evaluate an immersive and interactive virtual environment experience that “goes beyond”: How could you provide interesting, inspiring, or meaningful experiences in VR? That is, what experiences could you provide in VR that are otherwise difficult, dangerous, or hard to experience? Instead of using VR as only a past-time and ultimate sensory overload tool to wow people, how could you use it for something more interesting, novel, exciting, or meaningful?” Be prepared for some exciting showcases!
In case you can’t make it to the interactive project showcase, you can join the public project video presentation session on Thursday June 29th at 2:30pm, in Surrey room #5380, or wait for the best videos to be posted online.
See SFU’s media release, on publicnow.com for current media information, and the Teaching & Learning blog for a news story on this course from Spring 2013, entitled: “How a SIAT course in immersive environments exposed students to the real world”
See my teaching page and SFU media release for more infos. The redesign of the 2013 offering of the course was supported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invaluable ongoing assistance by educational consultant Barb Berry.
Pictures from showcase:
Sample Project Videos
Forlorn
Canvas of Sound 
Echo 
Adrift
Finding Home 
The Cave
Project posters:
Executive summaries that were handed out during the showcase
Showcase and Project Videos from Fall 2016 offering
IAT 445 immersive environments showcase Fall 2016
Below are the project posters and pictures from our showcase on Friday December 9th 2016, where students from my course on “immersive environments” (IAT 445) presented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:00am — 2pm. See also SFU’s Media Advisory.
Students were tasked to design for a purposeful and immersive user experience — this semester’s design challenge for students was evoking a strong yet meaningful feeling of empathy
Here’s the official SFU 1-minute coverage of my IAT 445 Immersive Environments course:
and media coverage from BlackPress at http://www.northdeltareporter.com/news/405786476.html]
Sample Project Videos
Parallel Minds
The Reef
The Painter
Retrograde
Below are the project posters:
and the first page of the executive summaries (see here for Full pdf's)
other project pictures and materials:
Showcase and Project Videos from Summer Intersession 2015 offering
Below are the project posters and pictures from our showcase on Friday June 26th 2015
this semester’s design challenge for students was evoking a strong yet meaningful emotional or visceral response using an immersive environemnt built with the game engine Unity3D that most students just started learning at the beginning of the semester.
Sample Project Videos
CDM by team Much VR
Mystic by team Mystikal Lab
B-Eye by team Bees
The Passage by team M.O.S.T.
https://vimeo.com/132536087 Hooked by team Muffins
Project showcase on Friday November 28th 2014
Below are the project posters for the Fall 2014 showcase
Project posters:
Sample Project Videos
Omen by team Maze
Love &Grief
Sweet Sacrifice by team super sparkly pink unicorn 4K
Impressions from the showcase:
Showcase and Project Videos from Summer Intersession 2014 offering
Below are the project posters for the showcase on Friday June 20th, 2014:
Sample Project Videos
Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:
Team Skywalker: Fall from the sky
Team Dream Up: Awakening
Sweets
Team Zissou: Glow
Team imaginarious: Lukomorye
Impressions from the showcase:
Showcase and Project Videos from Fall 2013 offering
Below are the project posters for the showcase on Thursday Nov. 28 2013:
Sample Project Videos
Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:
Team Mindfulness: (REM)INISCENT
Team WAKE: WAKE
Team Segway: Azuria
Team Insanity: Conjecture
Impressions from the showcase:
Showcase, Project Videos, and Portfolios from Spring 2013 offering
Examples from Project Showcase
On April 4 & 5th 2013, the students from the “immersive environments” course (IAT 445) presented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus. 9 Teams showcased their own immersive Virtual Reality projects that they developed in the popular game engine Unity3D - for most of them this was their first exposure to the software. Below are first impressions of the showcase — thanks to all the students for their great contributions!
Sample Project Videos
Here are some of the final project videos of the teams:
Team Pendulum: Finding Alice
Team UFOria: Alien Abduction
Team Underland: Underlurcker
Additional media coverage: SFU media release
Student Portfolios
Below are some examples from Student portfolios which were created as part of this course to highlight students’ skills and projects and promote their competitiveness on the job market.
Amy Hsuanwen Wang
Devin Cook
Stefan Dalen
Sarah Han
Kyle Historillo
Khalid Abdullah
The redesign of the 2013 offering of the course was supported by a Teaching and Learning Development Grant and invaluable assistance by educational consultant Barb Berry.
