- Install, run, and host a spatial piece for a public audience — on the wall, in headsets, or both.
- Present your work to guests who owe you nothing and field their questions at crit.
- Submit a complete professional package: build, documentation edit, process book, AI log with reflection.
- Say honestly, with a semester of evidence, where AI agents made you faster — and where they made you worse.
2:00 · Brief The exhibition is the exam
There is no lecture today. The brief is fifteen minutes of run-of-show, then the room converts into a venue. Everything you've practiced converges here: the volume you learned to crew in Week 12, the builds you learned to package in Week 14, and the discipline of showing work you can fully account for.
What guests experience
The studio runs as stations: the LED wall cycling the VP pieces on a posted schedule, headset stations for the VR work, and you hosting your own piece the way you practiced in playtests — a task, not a tour; a reset between every guest. Guests include invited faculty and outside eyes. They didn't read your brief and won't make excuses for you, which is exactly what makes their thirty seconds of first contact the most honest data of the semester.
What you're handing in
The final is 40% of the course, and it's a package, not a file: the exhibited build as shown today; the 2–3 minute documentation edit; the process book — references, iterations, playtest notes; and the full-semester AI development log capped with a one-page reflection. It's graded on the production rubric — craft 30, concept and spatial design 25, interactivity 20, process and AI log 15, crit participation 10. All of it committed and pushed before your exhibition slot starts.
The reflection
One page, and the standard is honesty, not advocacy. You have fifteen weeks of logged evidence — use it. Where did the agents genuinely compound your speed? Where did they make you worse: skills that atrophied, bugs you rubber-stamped, hours lost to confident nonsense? You're the first cohort to run this toolchain for a whole semester. Your reflection is the real state of the art — more current than anything I can link below.
The field you're exhibiting into: UE6 on the horizon, headsets contracting until a cheaper Vision Pro (analysts say ~2028), glasses ascendant, agents in the editor, and reality itself becoming a capture format. At crit, every project answers one question: where does this work sit in that landscape — and what would you build next?
2:45 · Guided lab Install & run-of-show
One hour to turn a studio into a venue. Wall pieces install in scheduled order; headset stations set up in parallel. Everything on this list was rehearsed in Week 14 — today is execution, not discovery.
- Wall pieces load in posted order
VP projects hand off to the video server one at a time, following the Week 12 launch checklist: project open, render nodes connected, content live, tracking verified through the camera monitor. Each piece confirms on the wall, then yields the server.
- Headset stations come up in parallel
Builds were installed before today; now verify each one cold-launches on its actual headset, batteries above 80%, boundaries set for the station's real floor space, audio checked.
- Rehearse your reset
Run your between-guests reset twice, timed. If it takes more than thirty seconds or needs a keyboard, simplify it now — it's the move you'll perform most often today.
- Dress the station
Title card with your name and the piece's name, a one-line prompt for guests (the task, not the explanation), and your process book out where hands can reach it.
- Assign failure buddies
Pairs: if your neighbor's hardware dies mid-show, you cover their station while they debug the chain — calmly, in signal order, like Week 12 taught. Nobody troubleshoots alone in front of guests.
- Final commit and submission check
Build, documentation edit, process book, and AI log with reflection: pushed, linked, and verified from a machine that isn't yours. Then close the laptop — from here on you're a host, not a developer.
- Doors open
Guests rotate through stations; one classmate per rotation floats as documentarian, capturing each station with people in it — the exhibition photos your portfolio actually needs.
4:00 · Exhibition Guests in the room
The exhibition runs itself if the install held: guests move station to station, you host, reset, and watch first contacts — silently, the playtest discipline one last time. Whatever breaks, the show continues; how you handle a dead cabinet or a drained headset in front of an audience is part of what this course trained, and yes, I'm watching that too.
5:15 · Crit / share The final crit
The room reassembles, guests included, and the crit is the session's real center of gravity. Each of you presents from your station — the piece, one moment from its process book you're proud of, one line from your reflection — and then takes questions from guests and peers against the rubric you've known since Week 1. Every project answers the landscape question before it sits down: where does this work live in 2026, and what would you build next? Your answer to the second half is the syllabus for the rest of your career.
After the semester
| Task | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Cut the portfolio version: documentation edit, exhibition photos, three sentences of framing that don't mention the course. | A project page or reel entry a stranger can judge in ninety seconds. |
| Keep the repo: write a real README, tidy the AI log, archive it where a future employer — or future you on UE6 — can find it. | A public or shareable repo that proves the process, not just the result. |
| Pick your next move while the momentum is real: a VP crew role, an XR community, a personal piece — and keep the agent practice sharp; it's the newest skill on your resume. | One concrete next step with a date on it. Email me when you ship something. |
Resources
- Omdia XR outlook — the market context for your landscape answer.
- UE 5.8 release notes — the engine you now know, as the record of it stands.
- Epic Developer Community — Learning — where the learning continues after the grade posts.
- Claude Code documentation — the toolchain keeps evolving; so should your practice with it.