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VR job openings are up 800% year-over-year. Combined with the release of ARKit, which now puts AR capability in the pockets of nearly 400 million consumers, demand for skilled developers and designers who can create high-quality immersive content is growing at an unprecedented rate. Industries — from entertainment, healthcare, education, real estate, automotive, retail, and more — are looking to invest in this new technology to reach and engage with their customers.

To help give developers a leg up and set them up to take advantage of this growing demand, Unity has partnered with Udacity, the online learning company revered for creating world-class curriculum in areas such as virtual reality, AI and self-driving cars, to create two learning tracks: The VR Developer Nanodegree program and the newly-launched Learn ARKit program.

“Augmented and virtual reality are the future—so much so that the most influential companies in technology are betting big on their potential,” said Jessica Lindl, Global Head of Education at Unity Technologies. “It’s a great time for seasoned developers and newbies alike to sharpen their skills. We’re proud to work with Udacity to help equip developers today with the skills to create the apps of tomorrow.”

Unity and Udacity share a commitment to educating the global community of developers and creators on these transformational technologies and empowering them to create world-class virtual reality and augmented reality content.

“At Udacity, our goal is to work with the most incredible companies across the globe to build our programs—that’s how we ensure our students master the most relevant skills, and our graduates get hired,” said Vish Makhijani, CEO, Udacity. “To teach immersive technologies like VR/AR and give our students the best learning experience on the planet, we knew we had to work with Unity.”

Developers who complete these programs will learn how to design and engineer compelling immersive experiences and discover how hardware and software combine to make these experiences possible with Unity. These Nanodegree programs empower students with cutting-edge skills that are increasingly in demand, giving them a significant competitive advantage in the workforce.

In the six-month “VR Developer Nanodegree program”, students will:

– Learn the foundations of VR including programming and scene creation including tracking techniques, history, 3D scene creation, materials, textures C# programming, control structures, events, the entity-component model, procedural animation, and shader programming.

– Learn VR design principles and industry applications including ergonomics, personas, viewing angles, GUIs, locomotion, sketching and prototyping, user testing, spatialized audio, presenting your work, emerging technologies, and industry applications.

– Develop an understanding of the graphics pipeline, performance analysis and optimization.

– Learn 360 pre-production and post-production techniques and build an interactive 360 video experience in Unity.

– Develop skills for mobile phone-based VR and Desktop VR, game engines, VR design and user interaction, 360 video and spatial sound, performance and ergonomics, VR platforms.

You can learn more here.

The VR Developer Nanodegree program offers a complete path to expertise and career-readiness, according to Unity. Depending on your skill level and experience, you can enter the program in either Term 1 or Term 2, ensuring you’re working on exactly the concepts and tools that are right for you, with a community of learners focused on the same projects and challenges.

In Term 3, you’ll choose a specialization, and ultimately earn your Nanodegree credential, affirming your job-readiness as a cutting-edge VR Developer.

You can also choose to learn and develop AR experiences through the ARKit Nanodegree Foundations Program.

In the one-month curriculum, students will:

– Develop an understanding of visual inertial odometry, and discover the underlying computer vision mechanisms that enable ARKit.

– Build a variety of ARKit applications that allow virtual objects to be placed on the ground, on tables, or other horizontal flat surfaces.

– Learn to add dynamic lighting effects that change the color, direction, temperature, and intensity of ambient lighting.

– Add basic shadow effects to the scene.

– Master the skills to effectively “sell” the illusion of a synthetic object set in a real-life scene, in real time.

You can learn more here.