FoldHaus, Shrumen Lumen, 2016. [Photo: Ron Blunt]
The iconic museum recently announced a partnership with Intel and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) that turns its current exhibition, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, into a virtual experience on Linden Lab’s social VR platform.
Just as artists and curators are creating or commissioning virtual reality artworks to exploit the technology’s innovations, art institutions are moving forward with VR projects. Last year, the Guggenheim Museum partnered with Google’s Cultural Institute to let viewers virtually experience the museum and its artworks, while The British Museum turned its Ancient Egyptian collection into a VR experience. This week, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) announced a partnership with Intel and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) that turns its current exhibition, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, into a virtual experience on Linden Lab’s social VR platform, Sansar. Now those with VR headsets, whether they be individuals or groups, can virtually tour No Spectators (alone or with Smithsonian tour guides), an incredibly faithful simulation of the exhibition’s immersive room-sized installations, costumes, jewelry, and ephemera.
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View of gallery with works by Android Jones, 2018. [Photo: Ron Blunt]
Sara Snyder, SAAM’s chief of external affairs and digital strategy, tells Fast Company that No Spectators VR grew out of discussions with Raj Puran, director of immersive technology business development at Intel. Both wanted to make exhibition tours more accessible, particularly to anyone unable fly to Washington, D.C. After launching a pilot VR project, SAAM and Intel saw No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man–which was set to be installed in the museum’s Renwick Gallery–as the perfect opportunity to create a virtual exhibition, both for those who couldn’t make it, or who wanted to see it years from now.
“The works are totally immersive, completely unique, and come together in a context unlike any they’d been seen in before,” says Synder. “You expect to see them out in the Nevada desert, but you’ve never seen them in an art museum before–let alone one in a historic building just steps from the White House.”
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Marco Cochrane, Truth Is Beauty, 2017 [Photo: Ron Blunt]
“What we loved about having Sansar in this mix is the social element,” she adds. “Our curator, Nora Atkinson, has been giving virtual tours in Sansar, and she just loves the fact that she can go into this space and walk people around, even if those people are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or some other city, and connect with them in real time with the stories behind the pieces in an interactive way.”
ason Gholston, Sansar’s head of studio, tells Fast Company that Intel provided Linden Lab with powerful computers to process the data sets. As he explains, the photogrammetry cameras and LIDAR scanners produced extremely massive chunks of imaging data, much of it ultimately being technological superfluous to the eventual VR rendering.
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Source: Fast Company