Building Virtual Worlds is a project course at the Entertainment Technology Center where small interdisciplinary teams work together to build interactive virtual worlds. The goal of the course is to take students with varying talents, backgrounds, and perspectives and put them together to do what they couldn't do alone.
The course uses a variety of unique platforms such as Head-Mounted Displays, the Jam-O-Drum, the Playmotion, camera-based audience interaction techniques, Quasi the Robot, and others.
I was fortunate to take the course in the only year that had both Randy Pausch (author, The Last Lecture) and Jesse Schell (founder, Schell Games) as instructors.
You can learn much more about the project course on the BVW website:
http://bvw.etc.cmu.edu/
