Who will benefit from this?

The purpose of the intended VR application for exploration of dataspaces in the context of museological cultural heritage collection is to enable users to gain a better understanding and insight about the data at hand by offering novel ways of representation and interaction with the data by the means of Virtual Reality. Allowing the exploration of dataspaces by a non-guided discovery approach, the intended VR experience will be of informative, self-educative as well as entertaining character. This follows Viola Rühse’s recommendation that “online archives and digital collections that combine an educational and an entertaining approach seem to be more socially valuable” [1].

Exploration of Dataspaces in the Context of Museological Cultural Heritage Collections

The goal of the project “Exploration of dataspaces in Virtual Reality in the context of museological cultural heritage collections” is to enable the user to gain a better understanding and insight of a given data set (such as it’s contents, size, dimension, etc.) and identify correlations, dependencies and patterns among the data entries. This is achieved by providing intuitive forms of interaction with the data and offering spatial visual representation. We aim to give more context to the data and develop suitable forms for visualisation that will give reference to the geographical and chronological aspects of the data points. In addition, the use of VR technology will enable higher immersion and open up new perspectives on the data on display for the viewer and as a result increase user engagement. For this reason strong emphasis is placed on user experience and usability.

Exploration of Dataspaces in Virtual Reality

After working for an extended time on the Biennale 4D project I’ve been assigned with a new challenge: “Exploration of dataspaces in Virtual Reality in the context of museological cultural heritage collections”. The aim of this new project is to devise strategies for filtering, search and exploration of objects as well as developing suitable interaction patterns and forms of visualisation with reference to the geographical, chronological and contextual aspect. The subsequent development of interactive prototypes for VR experiences based on the dataset of the online collection of Museum Rietberg will showcase the findings. Furthermore we will investigate how the use of VR technology can add value to visitors of cultural institutions, either during their on-site visit or while browsing through the content of their online presence.

More experiments for displaying archival artefacts within an immersive VR environment

In a previous post the challenges of displaying 2D objects within a 3D space were discussed and texture mapping was introduced as a possible approach to display archival photos within an immersive VR experience. In this article insights gained on this matter through further experiments are shared. One of the most common practice for this purpose is placing pictures on billboards. Aspects such as the design of these billboards, their positioning, the reconstruction of observation points as well as the visual markers that guide the user to these viewpoints and last but not least the user interaction, that triggers the display of the additional content in the proper context, were investigated.

Embedding archive photos into an immersive VR experience

Biennale 4D is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that allows users to explore the archives of past art exhibitions. In addition to digital documentation of the individual art works in form of images and metadata, the Biennale archives contain additional artefacts such as expressive historic shots taken during the actual exhibitions. These pictures offer unique insights and share more of the spirit and atmosphere of the past events. The quest is to make these artefacts available to the user in a suitable way within an immersive VR experience.

How to guide the focus of the user to what really matters

VR today is heavily driven by technology and the design of many applications is influenced by the technology’s strong roots and prevalence in the gaming industry. Thanks to advancements in rendering and increase in computation power, photorealism is nowadays technically possible, however a higher degree of realism is not advisable for every application. It is important to critically examine what is the most appropriate rendering aesthetics for a given application context. A more realistic representation style indirectly transmits a notion of certainty, it takes much of the users attention and last but not least in the context of the Biennale 4D project it would present a big contrast to the quality and character of the archival artefacts.