Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes’s "Last Species On Earth", 2022, as seen in Echoes from the Future, 2023, curated by Tina Sauerlaender for the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Virtual reality for headsets and desktop.
Benefits for Audience
VR presents the most convincing rebuttal to the so-called immersive fallacy by integrating audiences with the digital experience mere centimeters from their eyeballs. However, mass adoption of VR hardware is a vanishing horizon, as demonstrated by Meta’s lackluster Metaverse results of 2021-22. These specialized devices are not common household items. Instead, developing VR that has cross-platform compatibility adds significant overhead in terms of design and programming time.
Benefits for Artwork
VR is an appealing context for many artists to work in, its immersive qualities approximating immediacy with a virtual space created and controlled by the artist. An artist must be skilled at working with VR specifically in order to achieve the alluring goal of immersion. The skills of a VR artist include worldbuilding, visual design,working with audio, and programming. Artists can also collaborate with skilled VR technicians to help realize their work in virtual space.
VR can have more relaxed requirements for the artwork it presents as compared to the limitation of mobile or browser-based interactive art, as it can be run off of a dedicated computer. However, this is often not the case, as the most popular headsets run on Android operating systems, like the Meta Quest products, and are basically as powerful as smartphones. And if the experience is developed as a multi-platform project, the constraints of the weakest hardware apply to its entire development.
Why Consider VR Experiences
- If you have a technically savvy team or artist, the immersion and novelty of VR headset experiences is unparalleled..
- There is a small but dedicated audience of VR headset users who are underserved. This includes both artists and a more experimental gaming audience.
Implementing VR Experiences
- The simplest method for creating a VR presentation is a 360° video. These can be hosted online, on platforms like Youtube, and are by default experienced on computers, smartphones, and VR headsets. A 360° video can be captured from a 360° camera (which is an artform in itself), but 360° footage can also be captured from interactive digital experiences in Unity—this is often a sound backup for a VR headset experience, so that audience members without headsets may be able to explore it on their other devices.
- Unity and Unreal engine are go-to tools for VR creation—though unnecessary for 360° video, as mentioned above. Both feature a range of tools to make VR experiences possible. Our experience is with Unity, and we’ve found the Unity XR Interactive Toolkit and OpenXR plugins very useful for designing cross-platform VR exhibitions and experiences. For the projects Geofenced and Hypercity: Augmented Reality Arts Exhibition we used the XR Interactive Toolkit. For the project Echoes from the Future we used OpenXR.
- When working with an artist who does not have experience with VR as a medium, for example a sculptor who wants to show 3D models, the technicians designing the exhibition and installing the work must be the ones considering the wider interactive context of the virtual space. This includes movement, whether the space is room scale (user’s movement in the real world is mapped to the virtual) or locomotive (movement in the virtual world is determined by user input, for example via joystick), how haptic feedback will be used, and how the user will interact with objects in the virtual scene.
Additional Considerations for Interactive Media Exhibitions
Access and Planning Considerations for Interactive Media Exhibitions
Art games, expanded reality, and other interactive media art forms offer exciting immersive and participatory experiences for audiences. With this potential comes a number of challenges for organizations who often need to find new methods to share such works with their audiences. Exhibiting interactive media forces the organizer to think like a designer.
Browser-based experiences of interactive media art
Chances are, you’re probably reading this through a web browser right now. Browser-based exhibition solves a lot of problems for audiences; it is most likely a piece of software already on your computer, no downloading is required, and it can be agnostic of the user’s operating system and hardware. It might even support mobile access, depending on the artwork’s features and constraints.
Mobile experiences of interactive media arts
The best computer people have access to might be the one inside their pocket. Accessing artwork either through a browser, platform, or custom application occurs through smartphone interfaces and practices that are already part of daily routines. However, the vast range of hardware and operating systems on the market can create some frustration when projects don’t work on a user’s particular device.
Augmented Reality (AR) experiences of interactive media art
As AR generally occurs on smartphone devices, the same advantages of pocket-ready accessibility apply as for mobile experiences of interactive media. AR continues to be a novelty to most audiences. While many will be familiar with the technology from games like Pokemon GO or social media filters, it can be challenging to those who have never experienced it before.
Multi-user experiences of interactive media art
The space of a gallery is often shared with other audience members. A multi-user digital interactive experience elicits a similar social function. Multi-user digital experiences make explicit the primary quality of a computer network, to connect people, and multi-user digital exhibitions add art into that mix. If accessed remotely on personal devices, multi-user experiences can bring the feeling of an art gallery experience to the user’s device by seeing (and possibly hearing) other synchronous visitors.
Implementing interactive media in onsite installation
Organizations with dedicated exhibition space should consider if their project would benefit from an onsite installation. Depending on resources, onsite installation can offer audiences an enhanced experience by providing them with pre-loaded hardware or a gallery attendant to facilitate access. Installation of these projects will often require the artist or a knowledgeable technician to assist with setup. Any onsite installation will benefit from a set of written instructions. Write tech instructions as plainly as possible—leave artspeak for artist statements!
Digital Exhibition Collaborators
In the development of digital exhibitions, it’s important to understand an artist’s relationship with their technology.
Pilot Projects
A critical part of developing DETAIL was the pilot projects. These three digital exhibitions informed the prefabs and templates.
Resources
Build your own digital exhibition spaces with our step-by-step guides and technical resources.