IIT Madras, Japanese Research Firm to launch Advanced Diploma Programme in Virtual Reality

The course would be open for anyone with an engineering background, including students currently enrolled in engineering degrees anywhere in India. Applications will be available from November 2021 and the first batch will commence from January 2022. The course will have an annual intake of 50 students. 

IIT said that Virtual reality (VR) is a powerful technology in which the human senses are artificially stimulated. Using computer programs, VR technology allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment to experience, feel and touch the images of past, present, and the future. 

An MoU towards this collaboration was signed recently between IIT Madras and Monolith Research And Training Labs an associate company of Monolith Asia, a leading Japanese media communication technology company. 

The course is being coordinated by IIT Madras by the Centre of Excellence on Virtual Reality and Haptics, set up under the ‘Institute of Eminence’ initiative of the Union Government. 

Highlighting the unique aspects of the program, Prof. M Manivannan, Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras, said, “Virtual Reality is inherently a practical and an interdisciplinary course. Offering such an experiential and interdisciplinary course online is quite challenging. Both IIT-Madras and Monolith have taken this as a challenge to offer this course for the first time in India.” 

He said the key objective was to serve the increased needs of professionals who are highly skilled in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality (XR), and Haptics technology. 

The course is offered as a part of IoE-CoE on VR and Haptics at IIT-M which is the country's first Research and Product Innovation centre for XR and haptics technology, also known as Experiential Technology Innovation Center (XTIC.org).