CSE190S2017

Spring Quarter 2017

Course Number: CSE 190

Course Title: Virtual Reality Technology

Course Prerequisite: CSE 167

Enrollment Limit: 75

Course Description:

Virtual reality (VR) has been capturing people’s imagination for decades, but only recently has it been possible to build VR devices inexpensive enough for the consumer market. This course aims to explain how VR technology works and the students are going to do programming projects to better understand potential and limitations of today’s VR hardware.

The preliminary course structure looks like this:

1. An overview of the state-of-the-art VR technologies and research trends will be given.
2. The fundamental physics of 3D displays will be covered, including the major 3D depth cues.
3. The most common display types such as LCDs and OLEDs will be introduced, in terms of display materials, device structures, working

principles and research trends.

1. We will look at various ways to create stereographics images.
2. Several quasi-true 3D displays, including holography, volumetric 3D displays and light field displays will be introduced.
3. Immersive VR systems will be discussed, including HMD-based systems. This part of the course will include a discussion of smart phone based HMDs as well as high end computer driven HMDs.
4. Challenges with today’s HMD-based VR will be discussed and software driver components will be explained and implemented in C++ with OpenGL.