About Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies

A Unique Concentration

There’s no script for how to harness virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies to tell stories that matter as they tackle the problems that challenge us. It’s being written now, by innovators in the media and entertainment fields, and by students and instructors in programs like ours, which boasts the nation’s first full-time curriculum on immersive storytelling and emerging technologies.

The ISET Area of Concentration offers hands-on, marketable experience employing the dominant emerging technologies for artistic expression, engaging storytelling, and social impact.

Fast-paced, innovative, and collaborative, ISET courses give you new perspectives on how technology shapes our relation to the world, to others and – most importantly – to ourselves.

Your ISET Experience

Are you ready to create new worlds, immerse viewers into the heart of your story, or solve complex problems using the latest in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies?

Through this highly collaborative project-based educational experience, you’ll push the boundaries of augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence storytelling, and explore innovative uses for these and other keystone technologies across disciplines. Guided by our faculty, artists in residence, research fellows, and guest lecturers, you’ll leverage immersive technology for entertainment and as a vehicle for change and problem-solving in medicine, public health, education, media arts, diplomacy, business, and beyond.

Courses cover everything from the theory behind immersive storytelling, to the future of cinematic gaming, to creating prototypes through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data journalism. Experimentation is not just encouraged but expected. You’ll collaborate with instructors and students from a host of backgrounds, including computer programming, visual art, journalism, filmmaking, music, entertainment, and other fields. The stories you create will be designed to engage audiences and leave them thinking about—and perhaps even acting on—vital business, policy, and social issues.

Past student projects have included experimental art, data visualization, animation, oral history, aspects of ethnography, and narrative VR.

Transformative Tools

VR, AR, AI and other keystone technologies represent the next stage in the evolution of how we interact with information, entertainment, and one another. The applications are endless and extend far beyond entertainment, with transformations already underway in medicine, education, manufacturing, the media, and other fields. Imagine creating the tools that put nursing students inside augmented reality emergency rooms where they can practice treating life-like patients. Or walking viewers through a news event in an immersive format that lets them feel as if they’re experiencing it in real time. Or helping to create geo-engineered solutions that combat climate change.

The continued development of these technologies and applications will unleash unprecedented opportunity for innovation across multiple sectors and around the world. This transformation will only continue, and on a larger scale and an increasingly faster pace, as the technology matures and its market share increases.

With this focus on immersive storytelling, you’ll be well positioned for jobs in creative media, IT, 3D graphics, and product design, filling such roles as VR operator, senior gaming and VR engineer, VR director, experience designer, and AR/VR developer, among others. Course are taught in a multidisciplinary environment, so you’ll also be poised for careers across industries.
With its diverse talent pool and strong academic reputation, Johns Hopkins University is well-placed to become a leader in VR/AR/AI in fields destined to be transformed by these new technologies.