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.
“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.”
Jason 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.
How they did it
The task of virtually recreating the Renwick Gallery build proved far simpler than simulating the artworks. Although Linden Lab worked off some laser capture data of the space, for the most part they constructed the building from its original floor plan.
For the artworks, Linden Lab worked with two 3D capture studios, xRez and Insight Digital, to assist in the initial captures of the pieces on display at the gallery. For one artwork, the Tin Pan Dragon, a dragon-shaped, pedal-powered car made of recycled aluminum pans, the team captured approximately 3,000 photos, which resulted in a mesh of about 1 billion polygons. Linden Lab took those polygons and multiple gigabytes of texture data and reduced it to 150,000 polygons, as well as one or two texture maps.
“Each of these pieces saw a 99.9% reduction in the total data footprint in order to get them to work in VR,” Gholston adds. “And that was, for the most part, a totally manual process.”
“We see Intel and Linden Lab as long-term partners to work together on more VR projects,” says Synder. “We want to continue to learn from each other, and to really tackle this question of capturing three-dimensional objects digitally in a way that makes them as real and present for virtual visitors as possible.”
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