Design of Virtual Environments

University of Washington, Winter 2000, Fall 2001, Winter 2002

Banks, libraries, stores, and universities now maintain a presence on the Internet. Citizens spend time (and money) browsing the web, conducting business and pleasure electronically. Schools and universities are looking for ways to offer distance learning opportunities and to take advantage of the Web. Just as the built environment must be designed, so must be the virtual. Some of the skills and experience needed to design good on-line virtual environments carry over from the design of the physical world; others are entirely new. In Design of Virtual Environments we explore some of the technical issues in the design and construction of on-line environments, as well as consider some of the societal issues associated with this new realm of social and civic interaction.

This course practices using architectural design media to represent and create spatial compositions and to communicate the sense of space. Design media covered in this course including both traditional handcrafts of physical model making, freehand drawing, projections and perspective drawing and digital design media such as modeling, QTVR and VRML applications.