Welcome To Virtual Reality MOOC

A couple of weeks ago, as a collaboration between the University of London International Programmes and Goldsmiths, Xueni Pan and I launch Virtual Reality, the first course on VR on Coursera, the world’s largest MOOC platform (it is actually a Specialisation, a collection of 5 MOOC that progressively build on eachother to give you a great grounding in how to create VR).

From the very beginning of development it was obvious that from the very beginning, there would be new developments in VR that would make some bits of the course out of date, almost from the day of launch, and others that would simply be interesting for our learners to find out about. That is why the course focuses on the fundamental principles of VR, the stuff that will be true for many, many years and in fact will become more and more true as the technology develops, things like the illusions of VR, the reality based interaction and the role of body language in social VR.

But we’re also sure that our learners also want to keep up to date with the latest developments, both in the consumer industry and the cutting edge of research. We’ll keep the MOOC up to date, but we can’t update it every few weeks, so we need a faster way of getting things to our learners. That’s why we set up this blog to accompany the specialisation. We’ll post here when we think there are intersting things to say (and we’ve included some older posts that might be of interest, including one annoucing the specialisation).

We hope you find this blog useful and enjoy the Virtual Reality Specialisation.