The idea of head-mounted virtual reality goes back to the late 60s. Today, almost 50 years later, head-mounted VR is entering the main stream market and with Oculus being purchased by Facebook in late March 2014, VR has been appraised to be a 2 billion dollar business.
At the same time, we are working on the next level of VR, which is to add a physical component to it, so that users cannot only see and hear the virtual world, but also feel it. Since the respective equipment, such as motion platforms and industry robots are too large and expensive to ever reach a broad public, we are working on "crowd-sourcing" haptics.
In this project seminar, students will design and implement virtual worlds and their respective physical components using Unity, then walk around in it wearing an Oculus.