IITM - Finland ¶

Course Contents ¶

GETTING STARTED: Course Info, Communication, VR Cardboards, and HMDs

ASSIGNMENTS, 30%

VR Cardboard: Setup and Calibration
2024-08-16, 23:59

0.00 / 4.00
VR Critic: Best Practices Guide
2024-08-17, 23:59

0.00 / 4.00
The Room: A Unity Step-by-Step Tutorial
2024-08-28, 23:59

0.00 / 5.00
Twisters: User Friendly UIs
2024-09-11, 23:59

0.00 / 5.00
Bad Visuals: What Makes Content Eye-Friendly?
2024-10-02, 23:59

0.00 / 3.00
Bad Design: UI Havoc
2024-10-02, 23:59

0.00 / 3.00
Vection Sensation: Who's in Motion, Me or the World?
2024-10-03, 23:59

0.00 / 4.20
Color Perception: The Magic of Chromatic Adaptation
2024-10-09, 23:59

0.00 / 4.00

QUIZZES, 10%

Introduction, Bird's Eye View
2024-08-18, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00
The Geometry of Virtual Worlds
2024-09-01, 23:59

0.00 / 2.10
Light and Optics
2024-09-08, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00
The Physiology of Human Vision
2024-09-15, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00
Visual Perception
2024-09-22, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00
Tracking Systems
2024-10-06, 23:59

0.00 / 1.00

COURSE FEEDBACK, Extra Credit

0.00 / 1.70
FINAL EXAM, 30%
FINAL PROJECT, 30%
SitesInVR

0.00 / 10.00

WELCOME!¶

Dear students,

Virtual reality (VR) technology transports us to real or synthetic places that may be inaccessible, breathtaking, complex beyond our wildest imagination, or just simple and relaxing. Applications include entertainment, social interaction, virtual travel, remote training, architectural walkthroughs, cultural appreciation, and learning enhancement. Although VR has been around for decades, it always came with a high cost to enter the field because of advanced, expensive equipment and computing resources. Thanks to widespread progress in display, sensing, and computational technology, the newest VR systems are cheap, lightweight, and easy to program. This has caused a flood of excitement as almost anyone can pick up a VR headset and start developing experiences.

The purpose of this course is to provide you with a deep understanding of the fundamentals of VR. Because VR tricks our brains by presenting synthetic stimuli to our senses, it is extremely challenging to develop and analyse VR systems that are both effective and comfortable. To get a handle on these issues, this course will fuse together knowledge from a variety of relevant topics, including basics in human physiology, neuroscience, and perceptual psychology, and illustrate how they impact the development of VR hardware, software, and content.

This course traces its origins back a decade, to the early days of Oculus in 2012. Two of the instructors (Dr. Steven LaValle and Dr. Anna LaValle) were early Oculus founders. The course was first offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2014 and it has since evolved through major milestones, including the first NPTEL course at the IIT Madras in 2016 followed by extensive teaching at UIUC, USA, IIT Madras and the University of Oulu, Finland.

The course operates on an open-source platform, and voluntary efforts of all of the instructors are in line with the Finnish style of developing free educational materials and open-source tools to benefit everyone. Additionally, there is a free online book authored by Dr. Steven LaValle, as part of the accompanying materials. As a consequence, this high-quality course is offered at a very low price compared to others, making it exceptionally accessible.

This course aligns with our objective of establishing India as the leading XR hub globally. Referencing our whitepaper on the XR Gap in India (available at xtic.iitm.ac.in), this program aims to elevate faculty/professionals/individuals with basic UNITY3D/Unreal Engine skills into XR experts. Graduates will be equipped to actively engage in XR research and development initiatives.

Course Objectives¶

Upon completion of the course, you will be able to:

Recall all of the components of modern VR systems.
Understand the interaction between the hardware, software, and human senses during an VR experience.
Understand how the choices in hardware and software components influence human perception and the quality of VR experiences.
Identify challenges facing next generation VR systems.
Develop a basic VR experience using Unity3D.
Understand and be able to apply 3d modeling, rendering, tracking, and sensor fusion methods to the modern XR systems.
Gain knowledge in human physiology and human perception in relationship to VR.
Understand common perceptual flaws of modern VR systems related to resolution, latency, frame rates, tracking, lens aberrations, drift, and jitter.
Critically assess a given VR system or experience, and recommend improvements.
Formulate a hypothesis about a VR experience, create such a VR experience in Unity3D, and design a human subject experiment testing the hypothesis.

Course Topics¶

Overview of VR hardware: Projectors, Screens, Light Field Displays, Retinal Scanners, Waveguides.
Overview of VR systems software:

3D geometric modeling (Matrices, Euler angles, Quaternions).
Rendering systems and methods (gaming engines, panoramas, telepresence).
Tracking systems and methods (inside-out and inside-in tracking, camera-based methods, lighthouse, natural and artificial markers).
IMU calibration, integration, sensor fusion, and basic filters.

Overview of Human Physiology, Neuroscience and Human perception with relationship to VR

Depth and scale perception.
Perception of screen resolution.
Perception of motion.
Perceptually optimal parameters for frame rate, latency, and drift in VR systems.
Perceptual training.
Comfort and VR sickness.
Designing VR human subjects experiments.

Prerequisites¶

We expect students to come with a variety of backgrounds and we do not demand they have had particular background courses. It is important for you to assess whether you can handle the material. You can start by looking through the course info and the textbooks. Ask us if you are unsure.

Instructors¶

The course is developed by distinguished VR experts from IIT Madras and the University of Oulu, integrating the latest advances in VR research and industry practices.

Dr. M. Manivannan, Faculty at IIT Madras is renowned for his expertise in haptics, biomechanics, VR, and computer graphics, and has a rich background in teaching VR courses at the IIT Madras.
Dr. Kaushik Mitra, Faculty at IIT Madras is renowned for his expertise in Computational Imaging, his research focus is on Computer Vision and Machine Learning. He has been teaching Pattern Recognition course at IITM.
Dr. Steven LaValle, University of Oulu & IITM Visiting Faculty, is an early Oculus founder and a renowned researcher in Robotics, Motion planning and VR. Prof. Steven LaValle has also authored the textbook for the course.
Dr. Anna LaValle, University of Oulu & IITM Visiting Faculty, is also an early Oculus founder, has extensive experience teaching large-scale courses on VR and other computer science topics at the University of Oulu, Finland, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.