Steven Feiner

The overall experience of this course was frustrating due to persistent lack of clarity and communication. From enrollment and admission into the class, through the duration of the course, expectations and procedures were consistently vague and difficult to understand. Emails were rarely, if ever, answered, which made meaningful communication with the instructor nearly impossible and conveyed a lack of respect for students’ time and concerns. In addition, the in-class experience was disengaging. Lectures were delivered in a monotonous manner, and many students appeared consistently fatigued or disengaged during class sessions. Overall, both the communication style and teaching approach significantly limited the effectiveness of the course.

I would not recommend anyone take this class with Feiner if it's not for a major requirement. However, it looks like it's being taught with Lydia Chilton this spring, so it might be worth it. She was a guest lecture this past semester, and was really enthusiastic and engaging. As you can probably tell from the other reviews, the lecture is extremely dry and covers a large number of UI studies, with almost no relation to the assignments. While it may be extremely painful, and no one else does it, going to lecture helps with remembering the seemingly random theories/studies asked about on the final. How to do well: For the assignments, remember that the most important thing is that your application meets Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics (and if they were coding projects, that they work). For the final, I picked out ~50 theories/studies from the lecture slides and memorized summaries of them, which worked out well.

Interesting material but presented in a very confusing manner. Will someone explain to Feiner how to use Visio and Powerpoint so that no other student has to put up with his badly drawn overhead slides, he does also teach User Interface Design. Very confusing and extremly poorly written programming assignments that the majority of students have no idea how to tackle. TAs are swamped with questions. Makes disparaging remarks in class about those who do poorly in midterm.

Class is not as bad as reviews claim -- the prof covers a lot of dense content quite quickly. If you're interested in graphics/vr/ar it's incredibly interesting, but thankfully it's never really tested on paper, only on how you apply high-level concepts. I personally enjoyed the content a lot and would really recommend it, being the most interesting class I took last semester by far. Becoming very familiar with Unity by the end of the course was also a big plus. The TAs are also really cool and interesting people, and I loved talking to them during workshops and such.

Boring lectures, outdated material, slow grading, unrelated exam, unforgiving curve. Take these into account when signing up for this nightmare of a course. The lectures use outdated technologies presented on the most milktoast, text-riddled slides you will ever see. Feiner was extremely unorganized to the point that he never assigned homework 3 and then allocated those points to the final project and exam: both of which were rushed and poor reflections of actual student learning. The only way to even hope you can pass the final is brute memorization with zero application of course concepts. The first homework is a solid way to learn API interactions, but the others are just awful. Wait until another professor teaches this course, you seriously won't regret it. I was able to pull a B+ in this class because I took essentially the same course in undergrad, but many of my friends fell in the C-range despite actually being pretty good in the class up until that point. Overall, just don't.

A mediocre lecturer who takes a lot of time to confuse you, instead of doing it quickly like other comp sci profs. At least, that was my impression until I stopped going to class. His lateness policy is a breath of very cool fresh air -- thank god, because the assignments themselves are poorly designed and students are ill-prepared for them. Like in some other comp sci courses (ahem, OS), you get the feeling that the professor and TAs started out with very ambitious assignments that they were going to prepare students for -- until they forgot to do the preparation part. But even that may be being overly generous, because the net result is inexcusable: students have no clue how to approach the programming, and TA office hours (again, so much like OS and other high-level CS classes) turn into unofficial cheating sessions where beleagured TAs have no choice but to disseminate crucial information (that the rest of the class doesn't get). I don't know if Feiner and his TAs even realize how much potential for learning gets thrown out in the process. And while there may be worse professors in the department, that doesn't make Feiner good. The bottom line? Steer clear.

The description for this class could never have prepared me for how horrible this class is. The grade based purely on the coding assignments, and his lectures are incredibly boring and completely unrelated to the assignments. Feiner is the WORST professor I have ever had in all my time at Columbia.

Tip for the Final: shallow understanding of concepts would not work, make sure to read the papers and spend hours fully understand them. Three of four projects involve HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

I strongly suggest you to NOT take this course. The title of the course is very misleading. There is nothing about AR in such. The course is all about UI and graphics, and the professor does not want you to do any new things in his course. Any new idea will be crushed by professor and his some puppet lab assistant who are equally rude as him. The course content has nothing to do with the assignments or the final project you get. For the first half of the class his slides as basically history classes for graphics and you get to learn nothing. If you want to get grade in this class you need to be in his lab all the time just do what he says basically just follow him and forget the other courses you take. No matter what project you do you will not get marks because he neither tell you anything that is wrong with your project nor gives any suggestions until the final presentation by then you are basically screwed. My language might be harsh but this is nothing in comparison to the disappointment we got after taking this class.

Feiner seems to be passionate about user interfaces. His lectures, however, betray this notion because they are extremely boring. I found his assignments to be great tools for learning Javascript and how to interact with APIs. The final was ridiculous. He basically asked random questions about anything from the lectures to the grossly large amounts of assigned reading. If you wish to do well on his exams, MEMORIZE EVERYTHING, otherwise you are screwed. I find it to be of poor taste when professors give assignments and exams that are completely unrelated and that rely, not on applicative knowledge, but pure memorization. He seems to be a man of habit, so I'm not counting on this ever changing.