Vak: Interactive Environments credits: 5

In the Elective Interactive Environments students learn to design and build applications that interact with the real world and create interactive environments outside the screen. Digital games escape the traditional screen, keyboard and game controller more and more often. There are many new application areas, actual locations and ways of controlling that bring gaming experiences to the real world. Whether it is for exhibits, museums, VR/AR escape rooms or interactive art, games combined with real world interactions are a very powerful and engaging way to convey a message. 

Students learn to critically analyze current events and how distill these down to a specific poignant topical issue to reflect on through the use of an interactive installation. Over the course of the first weeks of the elective, they will learn to give shape to a question or comment they wish to convey during the plenary moments. During the workshop moments they dive into new technologies and learn to adopt and implement these by connecting them to their own knowledge foundation. The latter weeks revolve around integrating individual sub-products based on these technologies to form a coherent final product that builds up to the conveyance of this comment or question.