Biennale 4D — A Journey in time: Virtual reality experience to explore the archives of the Swiss pavilion at the “Biennale di Venezia” art exhibition

The Swiss pavilion at “Biennale di Venezia” offers a platform for national artists to expose their work. This well-known and well-documented white cube showcases the changes of contemporary Swiss art from the early 50s up to the present day. The aim of the “Biennale 4D” project is to make the archives of these past art exhibitions more comprehensible by creating an interactive explorative environment through the use of innovative Virtual Reality (VR) technology. The project poses multiple challenges like visualization of historic content and its documentation, dealing with the heterogeneity and incompleteness of archives, interaction design and interaction mapping in the virtual space, integration of metadata as well as realizing a Virtual Reality experience for the public space with current VR technology. Extensive research has been conducted regarding the state of the art of VR technology in the given application field, possible forms of visual representation and rendering methods, interaction patterns as well as suitable user experience testing methods. A pilot application has been developed that features exemplary scenes with exhibit samples of various types and materiality and model scenarios covering varying degrees of documentation levels. This prototype offers features such as time travel, spatial movement and interaction with metadata. Furthermore, the experience has been enhanced with additional archive material. At the launch of the application, the user learns within a demo environment how to apply the functionalities listed above. The application has been tested thoroughly in regards to user experience and usability and was well received by the test audience. In this paper we highlight possible approaches using Virtual Reality in terms of user experience, interaction design and visualization, and the actual implementation of the Biennale 4D pilot application. We discuss challenges of realizing public VR environments today based on the responses gathered in a user study.