The College of Environment + Design is taking steps towards offering virtual and augmented reality as a tool for environmental design, urban planning, and landscape architecture. Virtual reality opens the door for new avenues of understanding environmental change, preserving historical landscapes, and communicating otherwise unseen aspects of the landscape while mobile-based augmented reality has potential to communicate these aspects of the environment, culture, and history as the user is on-site of these locations. 

Over the summer, Micah Taylor (PhD student of Environmental Design), Edwin Yan (Computer Science student), and Melissa Thomas (Computer Science graduate) developed a series of 'drag and drop' Unity templates along with accompanying tutorial videos to streamline students of design and planning implementing this technology without the need to write code. While developed for the College of Environment + Design, students in all fields may use these same templates to get a head-start on using these emerging technologies.

On Thursday, November 29th from 11am-12pm, Micah Taylor, from the College of Environment + Design, will give a demonstration on getting basic digital content into a virtual scene as well as a mobile based augmented reality scene using the Unity templates and show videos produced for students who wish to take on emerging technology development in their own projects. This demonstration happens in the Science Library Makerspace, room 381 in the Science Library.