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Why VR? And before you answer that, we should ask “What IS VR?”
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VR is a new medium. The magic of VR isn’t a fancy set of stereoscopic googles, it’s a design shift in thinking about the way people see and interact with digital worlds. When you’re building a virtual reality world, you’re trying to create a virtual reality. This presents a whole slew of new challenges:
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Presence: What is it?
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Immersion: What creates it? What breaks it?
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Motion sickness: Why does it happen? What causes it? How do you prevent it?
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Motion Controllers: How do you create a seamless interaction between user intention and desired game response?
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User Interfaces: How do you create user interfaces which don’t break immersion and presence?
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Locomotion Systems: How do people move around? Room scale in a box? Teleportation? Walk a motion? Rails?
So, anyone working in virtual reality will eventually have to grapple with these new areas. The question you’re going to have to ask is whether you want to teach an animation class or teach a class on virtual reality with animation added in? All the stuff you learn about animation can be done in virtual reality, but I’m thinking that adding virtual reality to the mix would turn into a distraction from learning the fundamentals of animation.
What would be interesting is to add a virtual reality viewing as a part of the animation and modeling workflow. Is the model built to the correct scale? Is a vertex noticeably off? Is there too much popping between certain keyframes? Are there seams in the texture? Holes in the mesh? etc. Maybe getting a single high powered VR HMD which the class can share and use to view their final product would be a good bonus treat?