Virtual Reality & Exercise Gaming

The course addresses the following topics:

• What is Virtual Reality and Exergaming (exercise gaming)?
• How can Virtual Reality be connected with sports?
• Understanding benefits and limitations of VR environments
• Introduction to programing for Virtual Reality with Unity
• Workshop in designing, prototyping, and developing for one small Exergame in VR
• Perform a usability test and use the gathered result during the development

Goals

The course aims at:

• Explaining what Virtual Reality is, history of how and why it was developed, and the potential future use of it
• Defining exercise gaming, and showing benefits of the connection with Virtual Reality
• Teaching how to develop first Virtual Reality game with Unity
• Providing a practical workshop by creating a use case design, a game scenario and by prototyping and developing the first game itself
• Performing a usability test and teaching how to analyze/incorporate the results into a next app version

Syllabus

The Syllabus for this course can be found HERE. 

Course components

The course is structured as follows:

Week 1: Lectures, discussions, and field work

The first week is focused on building foundations. Students will learn about virtual reality and exercise gaming in general. In the end of the first week student will be able to present a first concept for the own app.

Week 2: Developing own Exergame for Virtual Reality

In the second week students will develop their own first Virtual Reality app (used software is mainly Unity and Unreal Engine). This step will include the software setup and possible connection to hardware components.

Week 3: Evaluation of first app version

In the third week students will invite potential users of the app to the lab and perform usability evaluations. After the week students will be able to analyze and utilize the collected user feedback.

Week 4: Development and presentation of final Virtual Reality Exergame

In the fourth week students will incorporate the collected feedback from the users and develop the final version of their Exergame. The final results will be presented.

The general prerequisites of the TU Berlin Summer University are the following: at least one year of university experience + English level B2 or equivalent.

Dr.-Ing. Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons joined the Quality and Usability Lab of the Technical University of Berlin as a research scientist in January 2009 and is working there since 2014 as a senior research scientist.

He received his diploma in psychology in 2008 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, a Doctor-of-Engineering degree in 2014 from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany and has been doing research at the Quality and Usability Lab at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, since.

His research interests are in Quality-of-Experience evaluation and its physiological correlates with an emphasis on media transmissions and human-machine-interaction, including neural processing of multimodal interaction.

During summer 2012 he was visiting researcher at MuSAE Lab (INRS-EMT), Canada where he examined neural correlates of quality perception for complex speech signals.

In spring 2014 he was visiting researcher at the department of psychology of NTNU, Norway where he examined neural correlates of audiovisual asynchrony.

Tanja Kojić, M.Sc., received her M.Sc. degree in Information and Communication Technology from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb.

Additionally, she has done supplement studies for Graphic Product Design at the Faculty of Graphic Arts, University of Zagreb and focused on topic of User Experience design.

Since November 2017 she is employed as a research assistant at the Quality and Usability Lab where she is working towards a PhD in the field of Virtual Reality.

Please direct questions about the course to the TU Berlin Summer University Team at: summeruniversity(at)tubs.de. We will answer your questions and direct specific queries regarding course content to the course lecturers where necessary.

Registration for Term 3 is now closed. Check out our program for Term 4 or Winter 2020!