Our BTech Computation and Media (BTCM) is a four-year, eight-semester, intedisciplinary programme, rigorous and complex, involving a matrix of courses from Computer Science, Humanities and Social Sciences, Journalism and Mass Communication, and general engineering. It is a unique programme that lies at the cutting edge of media practice using emerging technology. It prepares our students to be engineers enabled to enter the news, entertainment, and user media and their related industries equipped with the skills and competencies required for the application of these new technologies.

An example of the carefully curated interdisciplinarity is that students learn language models, writing, media production, and the psychology of human-computer interaction so that they can adopt it in various ways in newsrooms, game development, film production, and advertising strategy.

Media, art and technology have interfaced with one another at each phase of technological development, from photography to the internet. Today’s technology includes the media consumer like never before. Not only is it interactive—it is quickly becoming immersive. The adoption of these new technologies has been across industries. However, these are primarily communicative technologies, and the communication-related industries are utilizing them, increasingly and in phases.

Game design is a thriving user-media industry that requires such a skill set. Game design entails the ability to use modelling and animation, immersive storytelling and, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like game design, sports media is another industry whose talent is in high demand in many countries.

In general, immersive storytelling is an exciting new norm whether in games themselves or in gamification forms: Industries such as tourism, which depend on promotional communication, may use augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) technology, for example, and also blend artificial intelligence (AI). A new form of extended reality (XR) is increasingly being explored. Experiential and immersive storytelling in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality; data visualization; videos using 360-degree cameras and spherical film will form the pivot of the learning in our programme.

News broadcast has particularly benefited from the new technological ecosystem. For example, the sociological ramifications of technology were particularly on display when The New York Times used the XR technology to place the viewer in the middle of a refugee camp in Syria to experience war first-hand. By highlighting the horrors of conflict that are usually a distant and detached reality, the media consumer is suddenly involved in change-making. This is a journalistic function, and it comes with ethical concerns. Similarly, the United Nations has evolved the “UN VR App”, which highlights urgent problems and urges citizens at large to take action. Our student will straddle this complex and fascinating journey of tech-enabled mediated communication with sociological, cultural and ethical considerations.