Designing for VR and AR brings a whole new set of rules to the table for developers, and one of America’s top videogame design schools is about to start teaching them.
The Cogswell College in San Jose, California, known for its game design courses, is claiming it will become the first-ever school in the world to start up a Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Certificate Program. The program will aim to give students an understanding of “cognitive and perceptual aspects” of both VR and AR as well as the skills to develop “human/computer interface and interaction design”. It will also teach the principles of VR design – something that’s still being discovered – and the uses for VR and AR within storytelling.
Starting in summer 2016, Cogswell’s program is made up of six individual courses students must pass in order to earn their certificate. These include “Perception, Cognition and Presence in VR/AR”, which will cover the fundamentals of replicating senses in VR, as well as “Human Computer Interface & Interaction Design”, looking at progressively more challenging problems in this field. Following that there are two design principle courses and two project models working on a “multidisciplinary collaborative project”.
An extensive industry advisory board is featured on the program. It includes CloudPic CEO Richard Chaung, JauntVR Production Technology Supervisor Curt Miyashiro, Citrix Systems Senior Architect Fabien Bourdon, Geomedia Director of 3DInteractive Jeremy Kenisky, and Azimyth Creation Studio CEO Stephanie Riggs.
Each course costs $699, meaning the full set will be available for $4,194. We’ll let you decide if that certificate is worth the price of admission. Either way, it’s hugely important for those wanting to work in VR to be as educated on the technology as possible. Bad experiences, after all, can turn a first-time user completely off of VR, and the more developers there are that know what they’re doing, the less chance there is of that happening.
