AR Design Class

This summer Layar is sponsoring the first ever college course on augmented reality design in the United States.

The sessions will be held at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and will be administered by none other than legendary Sci-Fi author, futurist and AR guru Bruce Sterling. The class will meet for thirteen weekly 5-hour sessions, and will be co-taught by ACCD professor Guillaume Wolf.

Students will mainly be involved in building augmented reality projects for their design portfolios. "I'm going to encourage them to aim a little ahead of the state-of-the-art in today's AR," says Bruce Sterling. "In other words, while they familiarize themselves with what is out in the practice today, they need to design for hardware and software capacities 18 to 24 months in the future."

Some topics planned for the class include...

• AR in theory and practice.
• AR trendspotting.
• AR outside the handset.
• AR as an app, add-on or control interface for other services.
• AR in the art world.
• AR in the city.
• AR in the Futurist Quadrant.

Here's how ACCD describes the class:

How did Augmented Reality become a real-life industry? Join Bruce Sterling - acclaimed Science Fiction writer and Art Center's Visionary in Residence - in this explorative project sponsored by Layar, the world's largest mobile Augmented Reality platform.

In this trans-disciplinary project you will immerse yourself in Augmented Reality's tools, approaches and ideas - how they developed, why that happened, who did it, and what comes next.

Layar's mission is to transform augmented Reality into a true mass medium. We plan to help. Augmenting reality requires close study of a strange new AR ecosystem: geolocation, registration, sensors, chipsets, operating systems, handheld devices, application, markers, social networking and experience design. AR business models include games, tourism, urban navigation, video, arts and entertainment.

This is the first course taught on AR design in the USA, and students will need to build apps, prototype, speculate, and outguess events in this very fast moving new field. Expect some AR guest star in to lecture and demo, but above all, expect the unexpected.