I was recently invited to teach a workshop on Immersive Storytelling and Virtual Reality at Shih Chien University. Unlike other media technology advancement in the past, designing and producing for VR shares similar tools as those ones used by current digital media designers and producers. The only technical hurdle might be picking up Unity 3D or Unreal Engine during the transition.
With that in mind, I put together a set of tutorial scenarios that are based on various mechanics we found in VR explorations – 360 video playback, virtual tour, and gaze-centric interaction. These scenarios can be utilized for making fun and immersive Google Cardboard VR experiences without writing a line of code. These scenarios also set artists and designers free from the technical challenges and enable them to focus more on creating unique and transcendental aesthetics for that imagined world of theirs.
The week-long workshop was very productive and quality of works were amazing. Workshop participants, mostly sophomores and juniors media design students, were encouraged to bring their media production expertise to this real-time and interactive new media frontier. In this particular mixed of talents, there are glitched video artists, experimental documentarians, 2D illustrators, poets, sound designers, and Cinema 4D magicians. They successfully brought their screen-based works into omni-immersive narrative explorations and rides in this workshop.
I am very proud of all the workshop participants and grateful for the opportunity to test out these tutorial scenarios. I am excited to bring the results back to Parsons and contribute them to our 2016 Fall minor of the same name. Before that I will run the workshop a few more times at Parsons, especially the VR extravaganza on π day with our Design & Technology students and a group of middle school minecraft experts!
實踐大學媒體傳達設計學系 創新媒體國際設計工作營！六天工作營（三天課程＋三天取材製作）產出4組VR虛擬實境作品（每組均包含組員個人作品）授課教授：Parsons School of Design 設計與科技系 Design and Technology 系主任 Kyle Li 客座講師 Shiny Lee
moments from the workshop:
↑↑↑↑Food Hunter: Roller coaster + grocery shopping + gourmet cooking.
↑↑↑↑Drift In: A realistic but glitched world you can’t escape.
↑↑↑↑Bag: Life inside bags.
↑↑↑↑Rainbow: Walking into an illustrator’s rendering of a poetic world.