Allgemeines

This course is a product of the teaching research project "Medienpraxiswissen" (http://medienpraxiswissen.rub.de/). As an Open Educational Resource, it serves to make a course from the project accessible to other teachers.

The course is designed for media practice teaching. The aim of the course is to familiarise students with the the media, technical, social and economic aspects of (visions of) the metaverse.

The course offers a mix of conceptual, exploratory and practical work. There are regular readings to accompany sessions, and some sessions are mostly about discussions and reflections, yet the majority of the session are hands-on explorations of media technologies associated with the metaverse and visits to current instantiations of virtual or augmented realities. This requires some willingness and ability on the part of teachers and students for technical matters, i.e. installing software, learning to use some software e.g. for scanning or manipulating scans. It also means students need to have access to a computer that works with the software that is used.

Course Description

‘The metaverse’ does not yet exist. It merely exists as many different visions of a future of computing, especially a future that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg would like to shape. Meanwhile, the history of computing has been marked by visions of augmented or virtual reality. Precursors of today’s visions are not only game worlds or earlier virtual environments like Second Life, but visions of how computers and their sensors are integrated into environments. At the same time, many media-technical elements of the metaverse-to-come already exist, such as games engines or VR glasses. This seminar therefore deals with visions of metaverses and their current media-technical instantiations. It will look at some of the back stories of current and future metaverses, and then take a critical look at current media, technical, social and economic aspects of existing offerings (e.g. the blockchain-based Decentraland). Practically, some of these virtual and augmented environments will be explored through participation, and students will use some of the tools to build virtual environments, such as scanners for creating virtual 3D objects, and the world builders integrated into different virtual platforms. The aim of the seminar is to historically classify and critically reflect on some essential aspects of metaverses, in order to enable an informed media-practical approach to them.

Course Work and Exam

The class can be assessed in different ways. It was conceived as a media practice class in which there is only coursework and no examinations. It assumes regular participation from students. The main task is to work in groups to build a virtual room, including scanning objects and working on virtual models of objects in a 3D graphics suite. 

Students can come up with their own thematic ideas for the virtual rooms, which should ideally be related to the class (such as general questions of virtuality, of embodiment, of scanning / importing / reproducing realities in VR, of the busines models of the metaverse, and so on). This could be anything from an archive of weird VR interfaces or worlds, an archive of virtual reality technologies such as different iterations of VR glasses, to an exhibition of famous NFTs, of AR art or games, to an exhibition of glitch art highlighting the inherent challenges of scanning, etc.

Students ideally complete rooms by the end of the class so there can be a session dedicated to exploring the rooms - potentially in VR - and to discuss the issues addressed in them, possibly as part of a student exhibition.

In addition, students could be asked to reflect on their experience of building a virtual room, partaking in the group work, and focusing on one of the topics covered in class specifically. A length of around 1000 words would be appropriate and productive. Alternatively, students could be asked to write longer exploratory or reflective essay as an exam format.