Embodied Religion and Mixed Reality

3 Units

If you play video games or enjoy immersive rides at Disney World, you have experienced extended reality (XR): immersive technologies that blend "real" and virtual worlds or create wholly virtual experiences. While these technologies have exploded onto the market in recent years, this blending of the real world with imagined, or virtual, worlds has been fundamental to sacred spaces since antiquity. This course explores this intersection between sacred space and extended reality. Through hands-on experience that combines art history, religious studies, and programming and digital modeling, students will confront the technological and interpretative challenges that structure the XR experiences they encounter in their daily lives. Working in teams, students will create XR models and reflect on the nature of religious experience, both past and present. Offered as ARTH 305 and ARTH 405 and RLGN 305 and RLGN 405 .