I want to underscore this suggestion for another reason: computer science isn't one thing, but a whole host of related disciplines. I think of medicine as an an

I want to underscore this suggestion for another reason: computer science isn't one thing, but a whole host of related disciplines. I think of medicine as an analogy. Even if someone wanted "the basics", and you ask 10 computer scientists, you might get different answers. Turing machines? Automata? Compilers? Algorithms? Solve time? What we tend to think of as "basics" happen to be what the problems were 50 years ago in computer science. If you don't have machines, you study the theory. If you have a very simple machine, you study the solve time (big O notation type stuff, although with exponential growth that is becoming more, not less, important). All this is to say if you want to study VR/AR, perhaps the most important aspect is the relationship between the view angle, and the object. You would need to know linear algebra, transforms, the effect on the viewpoint and so forth. Linear algebra is one version of "the basics".