CSCI 4830/6830 · Virtual Reality · Fall 2026 01 / 16
Lecture 01

Course Intro &
The XR Landscape

Dr. Kyle Johnsen
Dr. Kyle Johnsen Boyd 117 · VR Lab, Boyd 164
Headset model by J-Toastie · CC BY 3.0 · poly.pizza
Where to find this course

The room changes midweek

Map of the four course locations on the UGA campus
Miller Plant Sciences · Tu/Th
Conner Hall · Wed
Boyd 117 / 164
MLC
© OpenStreetMap contributors
Tue
Miller Plant Sciences 120511:35 – 12:55 · 120 Carlton St
Wed
Conner Hall 021012:00 – 12:55 · 137 Cedar St · different building
Thu
Miller Plant Sciences 120511:35 – 12:55 · back to Tuesday's room
Any
Boyd — office 117, VR Lab 164Find me in the lab. Come by.
TBD
MLC, 3rd floorAnnounced when we need it
Course objectives

What you'll be able to do in December

WebXR Unity Blender
01Create real-time 3D environments
Meta Quest 3 headset and controllers on a retail display
02Integrate commercial VR hardware
World-in-miniature: a room containing a scaled copy of itself
03Evaluate interaction techniques
Crowd of avatars in the poster hall of the IEEE VR virtual conference
04Build collaborative experiences
Novint Falcon force-feedback haptic devices
05Novel hardware & software integration
Quest 3: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · World-in-miniature: Stoakley, Conway & Pausch, CHI 1995 · IEEE VR virtual conference: Moreira et al., Toward VR in VR, IEEE Access 2023, CC BY 4.0 · Novint Falcon: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Grading

Where your grade comes from

Individual portfolio — 40%8 demonstrations, staged across two deadlines. Public website, video per demo.
Final project — 30%Group. Novel VR experience, public demo Tue 8 Dec, noon–3pm. ~1 month to build.
Graphics & rendering test — 20%In person, hand-written, ~week 5–6. Concepts, not code.
Attendance & participation — 10%Discord reflection at the end of each class. You must be here to submit.

6830: portfolio also requires academic paper reviews · final project requires a user study.

Do this now

Get on Discord

QR code for the course Discord invite

discord.gg/PayUpbFdBX

  1. Scan the code, or type the link
  2. Run /register, pick this class, password passthrough
  3. Use your real name — it sets your nickname, and it’s how you get credit
  4. Attendance is a /checkin during class. No Discord, no attendance
/registerjoin this class
/checkinattendance, in the channel, during class
/attendanceyour record, rank and class average
/askask a question anonymously
/queue joinget in line for help
/queue listsee who’s ahead of you
The hardware question

Do you need a headset? Yes.

Meta Quest 3
Already have a Quest 3?Use it. You’re set for everything we do, including the mixed reality work.
40+Quest 3 headsets
MLC VR LabThird floor. Forty-plus Quest 3s. This is the easiest path for most of you.
Meta Quest 2
Borrow a Quest 2 from meI have a pile doing nothing. Weaker for MR, but they largely work — and great to have at home.
Meta Quest 3 on a retail display
Buy oneQuest 3 and 3S hold their resale value. Used and rental options both exist.

You need daily access, not occasional. Talk to me today if none of these four work.

The field

What is VR / AR / MR / XR?

XR the umbrella — X is a variable MR AR AV VR Real Environment Augmented Reality Augmented Virtuality Virtual Environment passthrough only object on a real table real walls, virtual world fully synthetic MILGRAM & KISHINO, 1994
ARYour real room, with virtual things added to it.
AVA virtual world that keeps some of the real one in it.
MRAnything between the two extremes. Real and virtual registered together.
VREverything you see is synthetic. The real room is gone.
How we got here

Sixty years, fast

Sensorama arcade cabinet advertisement
1962Sensorama
Sutherland's ceiling-mounted head-mounted display
1968Damocles
VPL EyePhone and DataGlove
1987EyePhone
Nintendo Power Glove
1989Power Glove
CAVE projection environment
1993The CAVE
Nintendo Virtual Boy
1995Virtual Boy
Virtuality 1000CS arcade machine
1995Arcade VR
eMagin Z800 3DVisor OLED head-mounted display
2005eMagin Z800
Nintendo Wii Remote
2006Wii Remote
Palmer Luckey wearing the Oculus Rift DK1
2012Rift DK1
Meta Quest standalone headset
2019+Standalone
The hype cycle: a peak of inflated expectations, a trough of disillusionment, then a slope of enlightenment
Sensorama promotional image: Sensorama Inc., teaching fair use · Rift DK1: Dcoetzee, CC0 · Power Glove, Virtual Boy: Evan-Amos, public domain · Wii Remote: MrNoobNub2, CC0 · eMagin Z800 and hype cycle: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Sword of Damocles: Rosenfeld Media, CC BY 2.0 · VPL and CAVE: public domain · Virtuality 1000CS: ctrl-alt-rees, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Quest 2: KKPCW, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
What actually sold

Commercial VR, 1929 → ~2012

A Link Trainer flight simulator A modern full-motion flight simulator
1929 →Flight simulationNever marketed as VR. Never stopped selling. The one continuously profitable business in this field.
Virtuality arcade VR machine
1991 – 1996Arcade VRVirtuality put units in malls worldwide and listed publicly. Briefly, genuinely real — then gone.
A CAVE projection environment
1990s → 2000sDesign reviewCAVEs sold to automotive, energy and pharma. Quietly profitable straight through the consumer trough.

Burn wound careVR distraction measurably cuts pain during dressing changes.

Exposure therapyPhobias and PTSD. Built at Georgia Tech and Emory.

1996 →Clinical VRSmall, rigorous, still standing. The research kept going when the market didn’t.

2016 → today · what sells now

Industrial trainingSafety, procedure, onboarding — at fleet scale. The big new one.
Design reviewAutomotive, architecture, energy. Never went away.
Flight & vehicle simNow often an HMD instead of a dome.
GamingThe first consumer success, and it paid for the hardware.
MedicineSurgical training, therapy, pain management.
FitnessSubscriptions. Top-10 revenue on Quest.
ProductivityVirtual Desktop is a top-5 seller of all time.
What people actually play

The games that worked

Beat Saber cover art
Beat Saber2018 · one mechanic, perfectly tuned
Half-Life: Alyx cover art
Half-Life: Alyx2020 · proved AAA VR was possible
Job Simulator cover art
Job Simulator2016 · launch title, still #2 all-time
Gorilla Tag cover art
Gorilla Tag2021 · no sticks, no buttons — just arms
Blade and Sorcery cover art
Blade & Sorcery2018 · physics as the whole game
SUPERHOT VR cover art
SUPERHOT VR2017 · time moves when you move
VRChat cover art
VRChat2017 · the world is other people
Walkabout Mini Golf cover art
Walkabout Mini Golf2021 · mini golf. genuinely.

Top grossing on Quest, 2025

  1. Animal CompanyF2P
  2. Gorilla TagF2P
  3. YeepsF2P
  4. UGF2P
  5. VRChatF2P
  6. PokerStars VRF2P
What the field studies now

Modern XR, in its own words

360° video volumetric display 3D authoring 3D user interfaces accessibility audio interfaces & rendering collaborative interaction computer graphics crowd simulation cybersickness diversity & gender embodied agents virtual humans avatars ethics evaluation methods haptic interfaces & rendering human factors & ergonomics immersive analytics games input devices locomotion & navigation mediated & diminished reality mobile & hybrid 3DUIs modeling & simulation multi-user & distributed systems multimodal capture & reconstruction cross-modal perception multisensory rendering perception & cognition presence body ownership agency redirection software architectures & toolkits teleoperation & telepresence therapy & rehabilitation touch, tangible & gesture tracking & sensing user experience & usability XR infrastructure

And what it runs on

Quest 3the defaultStandalone, colour passthrough, cheap enough to own. Where the users are.
Vision PropremiumMicro-OLED, eye and hand input, no controllers. Sets the fidelity bar.
Varjo XR-4simulationVery high pixel density and wide FOV. Flight sim and enterprise training.
Magic Leap 2optical see-throughTrue see-through AR with segmented dimming. Enterprise, not consumer.
Steam Framesummer 2026SteamOS, streaming-first, dual 2160×2160, eye tracking. Valve’s standalone.
Drawn from the IEEE VR 2027 call for papers · Melbourne, 27 Feb – 3 Mar 2027
My lab · Boyd 164

What I work on

A group of participants in headsets collaborating in a shared mixed-reality space
Live demo · IEEE VR 2027DrawnTogether

Collocated MR sketching. A whole room of people designing in one shared space.

HEAL-XR: first-person view of virtual legs in a gym environment
Live demo · commercializingHEAL‑XR

Mirror-therapy leg rehabilitation. Quest 3 and Vision Pro. Being spun out.

RCXR: a Unitree quadruped and the operator's point cloud view
SUI 2026 · in the labRCXR

MR teleoperation of a quadruped. Live point cloud plus a miniature replica of the robot.

MAR: a Blender model inspected in augmented reality
ISMAR 2026MAR

Cross-reality 3D modeling. Desktop Blender precision, extended into AR.

VRing: a wearable ring on an index finger
Submitting soonVRing

A wearable ring adding capacitive sensing and vibrotactile feedback to hand tracking.

Get involvedVRing user study

VRing isn’t submitted yet — the study is running this semester and there’s room to participate. The robot dog lives in Boyd 164 too; come see it run. Ask on Discord.

Course policy

What about genAI in this course?

Use it. You probably should use it.

Use a desktop coding agent
Claude CodeCodexAntiGravity…your favourite
Copy-paste into a chat window is not a good option. The agent needs to see your whole project — the files, the build errors, the scene.
FreeGets you unstuck. Fine for explanations and small snippets, frustrating for real project work.
~$20/moMost of the way. This is where most of you should be — everything but the most capable models.
~$100/moAll of the way. Worth it if you lean on it hard. Not required for anything in this course.

Attribution policy: you don’t have to hide that you used genAI. Worth noting when you did and when you didn’t — using it will not affect your grade.

Built with that workflowHello WebXR

Running right here — drag it. A few hundred lines of raw WebXR and WebGL, no libraries, no install. Open it full screen on a headset and grab the cubes.

Next

See you next class

Conner Hall 0210 · 12:00 – 12:55 — different building

Up nextThe graphics pipelineHow a triangle actually gets on screen.
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