Virtual Exhibition

Working with digital imaging professional Richard Weston, we produced a virtual graduate exhibition for Blackpool School of Arts photography students...

http://vision2020bsoa.co.uk/vr-exhibition/

I created the gallery space in UE4 and Richard used Tour Weaver software to create an interactive tour. You will notice that I have used the same gallery that I have been recently developing, but I have introduced side rooms designed to work best with 360 low res rendering in UE4.

I like the way that Tour Weaver straightens and zooms through to the next viewing point. It works a lot better than Kuula. However, it does not give you the option to view in mobile VR via Google Cardboard, which is a bit of a miss as VR stuff is hot at the moment. I am not a great fan of the labels and is something I need to think about moving forwards... maybe I should add them in UE4.

The gallery does give one a sense of how a particular piece of artwork would work in an exhibition space at a given size, so it works on that level, but it's never going to as good as full VR.

If you are reading this blog and feel you can add something to my research then please comment… even if you are correcting me or don’t agree with something that I say.

Designing to application constraints

I have just finished creating a virtual gallery for a lock-down Instagram project called 21 Day 21 Photos. I say 'virtual' as it is not true VR. The most important thing about this gallery was that it was accessible the maximum amount of people possible via the internet. Not everyone has a VR headset, so it was important to build it on a platform that could be viewed via a computer screen or mobile device. This was the first constraint.

The second constraint surrounded the 360 export resolution on UE4... I should say that other game/3D design software may well export at a higher resolution (UE4 exports at 4096 x 20480, but I have not the time to learn them. This meant that the images could not be too small or too far away from the camera, or they would look pixelated and soft when the viewer zoomed in to get a better view. So I designed a fairly small gallery based on octagonal rooms so that all the photographs faced the centre and camera.

I built the gallery in UE4 and used an online 360 photo and tour application - kuula.co - to host it. It was really easy to use, and the pro version allows you to add hotspots that allow you to teleport around the space. It also allows you to add info buttons which means I could show high res versions of the images in a pop-up.

You can view the gallery here - https://kuula.co/share/7XDYb/collection/7lnPs

Overall, it has worked quite well. I have created an effective gallery that can be viewed on a computer screen, mobile phone or tablet and via VR headset. You can also view it in faux VR via Google Cardboard. It is not cutting edge, but it impresses all who have seen it and does the job it is meant to do.

If you are reading this blog and feel you can add something to my research then please comment… even if you are correcting me or don’t agree with something that I say.