Virtual Realities: Digital Media, Imagined Worlds, and Immersive 3D Environments

Overview

Within the past half century, a powerful new paradigm has emerged in the ways in which men and women produce and consume information. The idea of an immersive "virtual reality" space for intellectual inquiry and exploration encompasses practices in 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 instantiate these alternate visions in increasingly flexible and immersive forms. Fueled by decades of exponential growth in computational processing power, these new modes of knowing are transforming the epistemological foundations of the arts, sciences, humanities, and engineering by providing new experimental, rhetorical, and experiential interfaces to information.

The purpose of the Virtual Realities FOCUS Cluster is to provide first-year students with a deep critical understanding of the impact virtual reality technologies have on our ability to represent and transform our worlds, as well as to imagine and create new ones. Our definition of virtual reality encompasses not only fully immersive spaces such as the Duke DiVE tank, but also algorithmically transformed media objects, online 3d spaces and archives, and games. In addition, in order to understand the relationships between these new virtual realities and their historical precedents, we will also explore and examine the galleries, museums, novels, and films that also fuel the imagination of new world environments past and present.

Student applicants will enroll in one of the two courses with a thematically-oriented focus and one with a production-oriented focus. Each of the courses in the cluster explores the underpinnings and the implications of the science and technology of virtual realities from multidisciplinary perspectives. The thematic courses will contain hands-on elements, and the production courses will tie back into the thematic courses through coordinated assignments and activities. Together, students will produce collaborative projects to be shared as part of the Interdisciplinary Discussion Group experience.

Visit the Virtual Realities web site for more information about the cluster.

Courses

Seminar: Visual Studies 192FCS.01 Virtual Form and Space

Raquel Salvatella De Prada, Visiting Assistant Professor, Art, Art History and Visual Studies

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).
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Seminar: ISIS 110FCS, Authoring Digital Media: The Victorian Crystal Palace and Virtual Exhibition Spaces

Victoria Szabo, Program Director, Information Science & Information Studies

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).
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Seminar: Classical Studies 85FCS.01 Good and Evil in Imagined Worlds

Jennifer Clare Woods, Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies

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)
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Seminar: ISIS 170FCS Immersive Virtual Worlds

Julian Lombardi, Assist VP, Information Technology
Mark McCahill, Consultant, Information Technology

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)
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Focus 99FCS.12 Special Topics in Focus: Virtual Realities

Richard Lucic and Victoria Szabo, Associate Professor of the Practice and Associate Chair, Department of Computer Science

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.
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