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.