A Peek into the Museums & Art Education using VR technology
Pre-word and some of my background
For a long time, I stopped reading news and only enjoyed the present with cooking, exercising and travelling. Future with AI & VR scares me. Human vs Computer feel like an already-lost battle for me, just a matter of time.
Then God leads my way to learn programming. So far, it is an amazing experience. Most importantly, I realized friendship and personal interaction is still the key in this field. The only thing matters is still people, feeling and love. Credit to the movie — Ready Player One. After some overwhelming beginning period, I opened my heart to welcome the whole new world.
I would like to know my field better. My background is in art and culture management and international education. My first exhibition(Congratulations from the World: Exhibition for for the World Art Treasures) was to cooperative with 7 museums(British Museum, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Maisons de Victor Hugo, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kitano Museum of Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Mexico: Sculptures of Javier Marin) from all over the world.
International exhibitions are wonderful experiences, but getting all the master pieces shipped around the world is a lot of effort and costing huge amount of money.
VR projects of art & museums
Although I found out this new technology through intel, it’s not the first time for art institution to work with VR projects.
such as:
- CyArk and Google launched Open Heritage. CyArk is a non profit organization founded in 2003 to digitally record, archive and share the world’s most significant cultural heritage and ensure that these places continue to inspire wonder and curiosity for decades to come.
- Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin to make Giraffatitan dinosaur back to life
- The British Museum turned its Ancient Egyptian collection into a VR experience with Oculus using React VR framework. (The demo I found online is more like a virtual tour. But since Oculus is involved, I assume there is a VR version.)
- the Guggenheim Museum partnered with Google’s Cultural Institute to let viewers virtually experience the museum and its artwork.(More like a virtual tour)
- This week(08/04/2018), the Smithsonian American Art Museum announced a partnership with Intel and Linden Lab that turns its current exhibition, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man, into a virtual experience on Linden Lab’s social VR platform, Sansar.
Intel Aims Something Amazing
The cooperation between Intel and Smithsonian American Art Museum would bring possibilities to the art world.What about a virtual reality experience for museum? Museums would have enough virtual space for all their collection and they could have visitors from anywhere in the world.
Education is another main function of all museums. But few children and students appreciate their museum visits because it’s not that interesting compare to games. What if we let museum tours be more immersive? VR makes it possible.
Some terms I found along the searching — AR & MR
AR — Augmented Reality
stands for augmented reality. It is the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real time.
VR — Virtual Reality
creates a totally artificial environment, augmented reality uses the existing environment and overlays new information on top of it.
MR — Mixed Reality
mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as “real,” at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.
Check out the videos below!
Find a way to go into the field
As a future developer, the next question I would ask is what language I need to learn. I asked google. Here are the seven most popular programming languages for AR and VR development.
- C#
- C/C++
- Java
- JavaScript
- Python
- Visual development tools
- Swift
It’s good to see the familiar name of JavaScript since we just started our JavaScript journey. And I also feel it’s a calling for me to go back to 42 Silicon Valley to learn C programming.