The Coursera Virtual Reality program will help you pick up skills to work with an emerging medium and make a game in Unity
In November, US based edutech company Coursera launched its first ever series of courses on Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The courses have been designed with Goldsmiths college under the university of London, and no prior experience is necessary. The five courses get increasingly complex, and cover an introduction, creating 3D assets for VR, 3D interaction design, creating social VR apps and interactive characters, and finally ends with making a VR game using the Unity game engine.
Dr Pan explained that the rules of cinematography have to be rewritten for VR, as the traditional rules of framing and camera movement on film do not apply to VR content, "We can understand this with computer games which are closer to VR experience because it is interactive. Whatever you do with your control happens on the screen. For conventional videos, the camera angle assumes the line of view to be in a specific direction. In VR, the director can get the camera to speak their language. They do not have to make the user look at where they need to. The user can look at where they feel like. It also opens up opportunities for many other new types of creativity. But all of this will take time. "
If we had waited for everything else to settle before we start, we would not have that opportunity to teach it yet. Our lives would have been so much easier with standards around it."
Unity is a great platform to make VR content, and we saw some interesting XR applications made using Unity at the first ever Unite India conference in Hyderabad. These included an app that pops up engineering drawings, a dogfighting game with airplanes, and a simulation for the Indian army that allows forces to get a realistic picture about a new area before operations. The Unity VR Game course walks users through all aspects of game creation, including storyboarding, prototyping, testing and implementation. The VR courses are available on the Coursera website, as well as the Android and iOS apps.