The Virtual Reality (VR) module combines the theory and psychology of VR with practical development skills. You'll learn the skills needed to design compelling VR environments and the skills that apply to creative practice, science and industry. This module gives you the skills needed to develop VR, including understanding the basic theory of presence in VR, which underlies the basic design principles. Using a 3D engine to create interactive virtual environments, you'll also learn practical development skills, including creating 3D environments, designing and implementing 3D interaction for VR and building social VR experiences with interactive virtual characters.
This module introduces you to i) industry standard tools for game development, such as game engines, and ii) the process of game development, including prototyping and playtesting. You will undertake a series of game development projects, each lasting a few weeks and with a specific brief. For each project, you'll propose a game that fits the brief then deliver the game and document it thoroughly. Through this process, you'll develop an awareness of intended audience and the use of media for documentation. Contemporary video game production draws on a range of techniques from AI to perform tasks like controlling virtual agents and generating novel content. This module also introduces crucial game AI concepts. Compared to mainstream AI, the emphasis is less on optimal problem-solving and more on entertaining the player with limited computational resources. This module provides practical experience of programming game AI systems and an understanding of the relevant theory.
This module covers advanced methods used in current state-of-the-art graphics and animation systems. It includes mathematical foundations, computational techniques and their use in creative practice. In this module, you'll learn how to write programs that generate animated 3D graphics. There are several distinct study areas: 3D modelling and animation, the graphics pipeline, simulation of physics and shader programming. You'll study a range of examples and learn how to program graphics in contemporary graphical software for different applications.
The Mobile Development module aims to give you the fundamental understanding and skills needed to develop mobile applications. By studying this module, you will learn the principles of effective mobile user interface design and how to design and build user interfaces. You'll learn about datadriven mobile apps, and how you can integrate an app with a data source. You'll learn about the mobile development ecosystem and how to develop, run and test your applications. You'll work with various sensors available on mobile devices using built-in application programming interfaces. The style of the module is practical, focusing on developing working apps.
In this module, you'll examine the notion of ‘interaction with technology'. You will focus on the concepts behind modern UX design and production and gain a solid grasp and practical experience of the process which allows the creation of interactive systems. This process involves specification, design, prototyping and evaluation. You'll examine several design approaches and techniques and consider how they enable usability engineering. You'll learn how to evaluate interactive systems against criteria such as efficiency and usability. You'll examine accessibility issues from the perspective of different populations.