Great Paintings in Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

Large collections of paintings have been digitized by museums (e.g. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New-York, USA) and companies such as Google. These resources can be provided to a wide audience through virtual reality as an instructional means to fully convey the size and the magnificence of these paintings. Accessing these resources in an immersive virtual environment can be beneficial to all the students who live far away from museums. In addition, making these resources available to a wide audience answers a current need related to the closure of many museums, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper provides a description of a fully immersive virtual reality museum where 1000 paintings can be accessed in two modes: individually (one painting per room), or in galleries (multiple paintings in a room) using procedural generation. More importantly, the proposed application provides a means for museums and art instructors to insert their own collections of paintings. Such an approach aims at improving the transition of high resolution images of paintings into art galleries in virtual reality. The application has been deployed on the Steam platform, is available for free, and has been evaluated positively by users, suggesting a high interest for such an application.

I. Introduction

Immersive learning technologies using virtual reality (VR) and advanced computer applications enable realistic creations of simulated environments [1]. VR has gained a growing interest among educational technology practitioners thanks to consumer grade VR headsets. As there are multiple kinds of headsets, there are different hardware requirements and different types of controllers. This variety puts constraints on the functionalities of the user interface. VR gives an opportunity for developing immersive learning approaches to support learners across the full span of learning. Immersive technologies represent a novel means of interaction with the environment [2]. They represent an active approach to learning and are intended to facilitate better, deeper learning of competencies, which are relevant for success [3]. The implementation of immersive learning technologies includes many challenges in formal and informal learning [4], [5]. Immersion is defined as the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience [6]. Education can be enhanced by immersing the user into a digital environment that sets the user directly with the instructional material. Data visualization plays an important role for interpreting complex data [7]; it is important to allow students to experience learning materials through different perspectives, such as through different vantage points.