Great Paintings in Fully Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

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.