Virtual guided gallery visits

Esther Schipper | Gallery VR tool

RECREATING ART AND SPACE FOR VIRTUAL VISITS.

The uniqueness of the artworks makes them hard to come by, especially if you’re a collector thousands of miles from the gallery, or in times of Corona, when visiting galleries is off-limits. So Esther Schipper and her team decided to commission a digital solution for gallery visits: an Occulus Quest based VR tour of the gallery space, featuring digitized artworks by renowned artists.

The virtual tour enhances the gallery experience by providing context in the form of insightful video, images, and audio alongside the objects. Gallery team members can invite collectors to tour sessions and actively guide them.

THE UNINTRUSIVE UI.

Collector-gallery relationships are built on trust. So even though the experience is virtual, access to the gallery team and the gallery needs to be as direct and transparent as possible. This led to a number of UI design decisions:
– The VR session resembles a video call, which is a familiar and everyday tool. Gallery team members appear as video call windows in the VR environment. These windows accompany the visitor and he/she can turn to them as in a physical conversation.
– The UI design elements are as unobtrusive as possible, leaving the stage entirely to the art, with elements appearing only in special contextual zones around objects.

The gallery team can conduct the visits from their normal work PCs and laptops and do not need to wear VR headsets, which lowers the threshold immensely.

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