Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad

Department of Information Technology

Course Syllabus  

1. Name of the Course:  Virtual Reality

2. LTP structure of the course: 2-1-1

3. Objective of the course:

Virtual Reality (VR) is changing the interface between people and information technology by offering new ways for the communication of information, the visualization of processes, and the creative expression of ideas. The course objective is to promote the understanding of this technology, underlying principles, its potential and limits and to learn about the criteria for defining useful applications. Furthermore, each student will be exposed to the process of creating virtual environments, by developing a complete VR or Augmented Reality (AR) application as members of a small team.

4. Outcome of the course:

The students will learn a ton about Virtual and Augmented Reality, get familiar with the latest technology, techniques and software, and build an application during the course. There will also be seminar presentations on research topics/articles (published in reputed journals/ advanced books) related with VR/AR by the postgraduate students.

5. Course Plan:

Component

Unit

Topics for Coverage  

Component 1

Unit 1

Introduction, Components of a VR system, 3D User Interface Input and Output devices, 3D viewing, Designing & Building VR Systems, Introduction to Augmented Reality (AR),

Unit 2

VR Modeling: Geometric modeling, Kinematic, Physical and Behavior modeling;  Selection and Manipulation during 3D Interaction,

Component 2

Unit 3

Travel and Wayfinding in Virtual Environments, Strategies for Designing and Developing 3D UIs, Evaluation of 3D User Interfaces, Traditional and Emerging VR/AR applications

Unit 4

Human Factors in Virtual Reality, Case study on Construction of Geographic Virtual World. Group assignments on implementation of a Virtual/ Augmented Reality Application using open-source toolkits/ libraries such as OpenSceneGraph, Vega, VRML etc.

6. Text/ Reference Books:

  1. G.C. Burdea & P. Coiffet, “Virtual reality Technology, Second Ed.”, Wiley-India.
  2. GJ Kim, “Designing VR Systems: The Structured Approach”, Springer.
  3. D.A. Bowman et al., “3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice”, Addison Wesley.
  4. John Vince, “Virtual Reality Systems”, Pearson Ed.
  5. Rick Parent, “Computer Animation: Algorithms & Techniques”, Morgan Kaufmann.

7. References (papers from major conferences/journals):