The Verb Collective

The Verb Collective is a toolkit designed to aid instructors in teaching virtual and augmented reality to artists and creatives who are exploring the medium of immersive technologies but who might have little or no background in coding. It is designed to fit seamlessly into the interface of the popular Unity development platform and, though it leverages some of the same structures of visual coding environments, it is intentionally designed without specialized interfaces. Though it has been found that visual scripting environments offer useful tools for rapid prototyping they also constrain students to the structures they employ while also teaching them a set of tools subject to change or becoming unusable if the proprietary codebase is not regularly updated. The Verb Collective is designed to be modular and lightweight and for student expertise in its functions to be directly transferable to the Unity platform as well as other similar platforms. While other popular toolkits are focused either on rapid production or on teaching code itself, the Verb Collective is focused on emergent dynamics and exploratory play with code. This model is suited to people whose interest in immersive environments and interactivity is spurred by creative pursuits. The modularity of the system is such that while it is limited in scope it is highly customizable. Designed with three tiers of users in mind, it functions as well for beginners as it does for more skilled developers. Focusing on the expressive qualities of the medium and on the the dynamic and emergent interplay of simple elements is a strategy designed to make the platform of VR and AR accessible to a broader range of people for whom novel experiences are privileged over interaction with existing industries or models.