Equipment

The VR galleries that I plan to develop are nowhere near as complex as VR based games so, on the face of it, I don’t need to worry about trying to put together a top end setup as I don’t have to worry about fast action, lag or flicker in the VR surroundings. However, I do plan to use high quality, high resolution images of artworks that are to eventually adorn the floors and walls of the gallery, so I still needed a setup that could cope with it and give the viewer the realest possible experience.

From the start, I decided to use the Oculus Rift VR headset as it is smaller, lighter and cheaper than its closest rival, the HTC Vive. Interestingly, HTC have positioned themselves as the number one go-to VR system in the art world. They have ploughed millions of dollars into its supported arts programme and has partnered with the Tate Modern to present the Modigliani experience (https://arts.vive.com/us/2017/10/28/modigliani/?region=emea&locale=uk), Thresholds at Sommerset House (https://arts.vive.com/us/2017/10/26/thresholds/?region=emea&locale=uk) and the From Life project at The Royal Academy of Arts (https://arts.vive.com/us/2017/10/26/from-life/?region=emea&locale=uk). Oculus does not seem to have such a programme at this point. The Vive does have the benefit of being slightly more robust, which is going to help its daily interaction with the general public. Also, the Vive includes a camera that gives it augmented reality possibilities, which is not something that I am interested in for this particular project.

The VR headset is only as good as the computer that powers it. To that end, I have chosen a beast of a laptop to power it; the MSI GT62VR Dominator Pro. Techradar.com only gives it 2.5 stars out of 5 and they describe it as ‘a desktop that wants to be a laptop… that's somewhat easier to carry around than a Mini-ITX computer...powerful at best, and at worst, impractical’. So why have I chosen it?

If the project was to remain static, I would have chosen a (vastly cheaper) desktop, but this is a research project and my focus groups and planned presentations mean that I am going to have to move it around a lot. I do not plan on using it off mains electric so the poor battery life is not an issue and the weighty compactness (and attached monitor) means that I will not have to go through the process of fiddling with a birds nest of wiring everytime I set up or dismantle it. It boasts a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, a 3.5ghz CPU, 16gb of RAM and 250GB SSD, which is more than powerful enough to drive the Rift without lag or flicker and allow me to develop and build VR gallery spaces in the Unreal Engine 4 app. Perfect.

Notes on Virtual Galleries

It quickly becomes apparent that most virtual galleries, available to view online, Like the Van Gogh, Modigliani and Collishaw’s installation, are either recreations of existing galleries or creations of galleries that reflect modern architectural conventions and aesthetics. There are loads of examples…

    

...however, the interesting point that is being made here, is that if VR allows one to create a space of any shape and size, then why are they all based on existing galleries. Is it not possible to create 'the ideal space'? One that "subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is art" (O'Doherty, 2000)...?

O'Doherty, B. (2000). Inside the white cube. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Pr.

Tate Modigliani VR Experience and Mat Collishaw's Thresholds

There are a couple of high profile VR installations within art galleries that appear to follow a similar format and are relevant for this project for two different reasons addressed later. These are recreations of either artists studios, as exemplified by the Modigliani VR experience at the Tate modern, or in the case of artist Mat Collishaw’s installation, Threshold, a recreation of an exhibition of photography by Fox Talbot in 1839.

The Modigliani experience is based in a recreation of his studio as it looked in 1919, at the time he painted his last self portrait. It is a guided experience into the artist’s world and tries to give the audience a sense of his studio, objects and working environment. The viewer has to sit and they are able to look around the space as they are guided through it. They are not in control of the experience.

Collishaw’s experience, on the other hand, allows the viewer to walk around a prepared space and interact with Fox Talbot’s gallery at their will. The installation is based in a room that is identical in footprint to the VR space and the cabinets in the vr gallery are represented in real life by similar shaped, but very blank boxes. It means that when the viewer reaches out to touch the cabinet in the VR simulation they can actually feel it (or at least its blank version in the real world). This certainly adds to the immersiveness/realness of the experience.

https://matcollishaw.com/exhibitions/thresholds/
https://frieze.com/article/its-kind-magic

One of the things that this (blogs) VR Gallery Project aims to address is the lack of space in art studios and lack of real exhibition experience that students encounter. We want the students to interact with the work like in Collishaw’s Threshold but in the restricted space of the Modigliani experience. It must be immersive and step beyond the ‘novel experience’ as exemplified by Modigliani but achieved in a much smaller space than Collishaw. Above all is should be a useful and accessible tool for artists. Usability is something we will look at later in the project.

...more Van Gogh related stuff

Artist Mac Cauley has taken Van Gogh's painting, The Night Cafe and created a VR experience that allows viewers to walk into and around the painting which is an interesting illustration of the 'cone of space' as mentioned in Brian O'Doherty's book, Inside The White Space.

Starting Point - What else is out there?

There are a couple of approaches to VR galleries available on the internet and it is interesting to see how they look and function. However, it seems to me that they are missing an important opportunity… Before I talk about about that, lets have a look at a couple of approaches.

http://visualise.com/case-study/van-gogh-interactive-exhibition

London based company Visualise teamed up with the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam to produce a VR gallery to present Van Gogh’s five Sunflower paintings. These paintings are scattered across the planet and the likelihood of them appearing in the same (physical) exhibition seems fairly low. So, VR technology seems to present the ideal platform for a project of this type.

They have created a very traditional looking gallery that maybe reflects the era in which the paintings were created, which seems to me to be at odds to the very modern architecture of the Van Gogh museum. Light wooden floors, plaster ceiling and deep blue walls, ornate frames and they have even included security cables to stop you getting too close to the work! Apart from the immersiveness of being in the VR space, they have used the technology to display information about the image, which appears (floating) besides the image on request.

Visualise give us some interesting statistics with regards to the reach of having a VR gallery available online and points to some real potential with regards to the dissemination of an artists work in the future.

• 6.8 million views
• 27.4 million people reached
• Over 200 articles
• 18 countries reached
• Featured in The New York Times, The Times, The Telegraph, Mashable & more

Interestingly Visualise finish their online article with a quote… ”The virtual gallery and live stream now provides a novel way for art lovers young and old to admire these magnificent masterpieces”. It seems that this way of presenting work this way is (at least in this context) seen as novel.

THE VR GALLERY PROJECT (a test bed for creative arts students?)

The VR Gallery Project aims to find out: Can we use VR to enable creative art students (or any artists for that matter) to pre-visualise their work within a gallery environment and experiment with the scale of their art works?

Why?

Art students do not tend to present their work in a gallery space until the end of their study and because they do not (necessarily) have any prior experience of exhibiting, they do not know how their work is going to look in a given space.

Scale is a very important part of an artwork. It affects the way the viewer approaches and understands it. However, most students tend to work at a table top scale, i.e. working on paper, canvas or sculpture that fits within the area of a standard table. A3 looks large on a table, but looks tiny in a gallery! Could VR give students access to a tool that would encourage them to think about scale beyond the table top? Could VR enable a student to pre-visualize the impact that a large or small version of their art work would have on their audience? The only way they can test this is by experiencing it for themselves.

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has finally arrived at a point where it can deliver what has long been promised: A totally immersive and ‘real’ experience that is completely believable. So can we use it, in the classroom or studio as a pre-visualisation tool for artists to experiment with scale.