If in the days of the first silent movies, with shaky pictures and a pianist accompanying the hardly decipherable events on screen the audience had been told that in less than 50 years, the medium that they were watching would be the universally accepted form of art, narrative and indeed communication, there would probably have been uproarious laughter.

This, as far as we can see, is exactly where we are situated at this moment in time, as far as computer generated virtual environments and the like are concerned. Manifesting themselves largely in the form of computer games today; as bandwidth increases and their viewing becomes more of a technological reality, virtual environments will be a widely spread phenomenon, on the internet as well as offline. We shall enjoy encounters with our favourite heroes, actors and actresses - not as passive viewers but as participitants in the plot. We shall be transported to where the news is breaking and when it comes to commercials, why only view the products advertised on the screen if you can actually test drive them, use them, hold them in your hands, try them on. And when it comes to human creativity, as in the visual arts, narrative arts, sound and music and indeed all combinations thereof, the possibilities presented by this new medium are simply staggering...

This website accompanies a course, CS450, given at Sabancı University in Turkey, which attempts to adress the issue of educating computer engineering and art/design students in the creation of virtual environments as well as computer generated, immersive media such as educational/entertainment applications and other, at this time, unspecified avenues of creativity. It is one of the main objectives of this course to teach designer and engineer to collaborate creatively on a project of their joint creation.

It is obvious to us that the creation of a tangible and convincing, thoroughly developed virtual environment, of a scope that tomorrow will largely replace the non-interactive and non-immersive "moving pictures" media of today, will require vast teams and the collaboration of a large range of professionals from diverse fields. Just as a movie team today consists of literally 100's of individuals occupied in many different tasks, the immersive VE of tomorrow will need producers, directors, researchers, writers, lighting specialists, decorators and costume designers and of course actors, real as well as rendered.

Just as with the home movies and videos of today there will obviously be scope and opportunity for private individuals to create their own virtual environments, as is manifested by the phenomenon of machinima even today; however just like creating a full scale movie "from scratch" is the job of true professionals today, the creation of purpose specific, full blown and fully functional VE's tomorrrow; that will be distributed to wide audiences, that in other words are the sequels to todays movie industry will be the job of true professionals, from directors and scriptwriters to designers and computer scientists, trained in their fields.

We are nowhere near this state of events today. However beginnings, no matter how modest in view of what lies ahead, are starting to be made at various institutions throughout the world and our endeavour is one such. This is a new field: As of yet, the problems as well as the approaches and solutions to these problems remain largely unclear. A lot of what we shall attempt to accomplish will be based on trial and error and we shall, quite inevitably, make mistakes along the way.

Finally: We are aware that the creation as well as dissemination of education in this emerging field is a team effort that transcends our own individual areas of expertise as instructors, i.e. computer science (Selim Balcısoy) and visual communication design (Elif Ayiter). As this course and hopefully new courses; and indeed programmes that emerge from this course develop and progress we hope to be joined in this labour of love by colleagues of all fields from the social sciences to pedagogy to music to the physical sciences.