Building Interactive Worlds with UEFN

A resource written by Apurva Shah on Medium.com.

Teaching “Building Interactive Worlds” last Fall at California College of the Arts brought to close my eighth year as an adjunct faculty in the Interaction Design program. I am deeply saddened by how this storied institution will be winding down under the onslaught of technological, demographic and societal changes. At such moments, we are reminded of the importance of hope and to view events within time’s larger cycle.

The locus of my life’s work over several decades has been to bring together creativity and technology from the earliest days of PDI/DreamWorks, Pixar, Capital One and now at Duality AI. In my engagement with my design students, I have tried to democratize access and build appreciation for this magical place where creativity flourishes on a technological substrate, be it the earliest computer graphics rendering techniques to the more recent generative AI tools. I remain hopeful that in our rush (and greed) to advance technology, we preserve the creative traditions that are foundational to our collective humanity and culture — otherwise I fear the worlds, virtual or real, that remain will be grey, flat and devoid of mystery and magic.