What’s next…teleportation? …AI coworkers and digital twins of ourselves? While recent crises have put telecommunications (especially meetings over streaming video) into sharp focus, multimedia interactions have long been an important part of our social lives.
Modalities change, though. Phone calls have largely given way to texting and videoconferencing. Early versions of person-to-person videoconferencing rapidly expanded to the multiparty soirées of Zoom. Hybrid content has blended the synchronous and asynchronous. Talking heads become augmented by virtual shared surfaces and objects. Mundane screens get replaced by VR and AR environments for work and play. While the hype has quieted (or, rather, been displaced by the AI hype), we’ve heard many claims that the metaverse will subsume everything.
Sound and sight remain as the dominant and incumbent modalities for virtual presence, but other senses are being blended in…touch, smell, and even taste.
These communication channels have become a critical part of our lives, for work and play, for learning and social exchanges, with colleagues, family, and friends. This course will combine critique of what currently exists with imagining distant futures, fixing current problems, and simulating near futures to shine a spotlight on the myriad ways we can be our social selves while being physically distant.
It’s not all about technology, either—much of what we'll explore involves using storytelling to convey compelling scenarios. We may do some simple coding, author a few web pages, mock-up some interactions, and create some envisionment videos, but you’ll choose your own way to complete projects, and won’t need particular skills in these areas to excel in the class.
- Instructor: Scott Minneman