# Efficacy of Virtual Reality in Painting Art Exhibitions Appreciation
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Experimental Design  
#### 2.3.1 Independent Variables  
The independent variables in this experiment were painting display device, including physical paintings, desktop VR, and HMD VR. Further details are as follows.  
Figure 1: The twelve original paintings of this study.  
Physical Painting Exhibition  
In the study, a classroom of coverage \(7\times 4.8\) m was selected as the exhibition scene. Twelve paintings were hung on the wall according to a certain order. There were two walls in the room accompanied by visual hanging scrolls, and the room after decoration is shown in Figure 2.  
Desktop Virtual Reality (Desktop VR)  
The exhibition was viewed with desktop VR is shown in Figure 3. In this study, panoramic photos were captured with a digital camera, whose center was the spinning axis so that the camera could capture multiple photos of the surroundings. These photos were thereafter processed, including the correction of slant and bent images and image stitching, and the light variation among the images was adjusted. Subsequently, a cylindrical panorama was constructed from all the images. This study set three observation points in the exhibition and used multimedia web technology to simulate and display the dynamic panoramic images combined with the web page structure. After logging into this web page, visitors could click the sign of the \"white arrow\" on the floor and move to that place immediately. They could thereafter move the mouse to change the position of viewing. There was a quadrangle pattern under each painting, which could be clicked with the mouse to present the magnified image and the title of the work, as shown in Figure 3.  
Figure 2: Exhibition of physical original works. The photo on top is the decoration of auxiliary visual hanging scrolls and the photo on bottom is the 360\({}^{o}\) panoramic scene.  
Head-Mounted Display Virtual Reality (HMD VR)  
HMD VR is a virtual exhibition area inspired by the decoration of physical exhibitions and constructed with 3 Ds Max. After its completion, the electronic files of 12 paintings were inserted and subsequently, the UNITY software integrated the scene and HMD. This was carried out in the form of a mobile application (App). Viewers could download the App and turn it on, and the exhibition was presented on the mobile phone as shown in Figure 4. The mobile phone was thereafter connected to the VR glasses which were mounted on the head. When viewers turned their heads, the image on the mobile phone would rotate simultaneously. This study intended that the subjects would focus on viewing the paintings; therefore, a movement method similar to the point and teleport in the study of [PERSON] et al. [25] was used. When there were no obstacles between the motion paths, this movement method was suitable for the VR environment. In this scene, viewers moved with the gaze-point at the middle of the image. When the gaze-point froze on a painting, the mobile phone could zoom into the painting (lower left of Figure 4). When the gaze-point froze on a painting card, it could be zoomed in the image on the head.  
and presented in the image (lower right of Figure 4). If viewers wanted to close the painting card, they moved the gaze-point to the \(\otimes\) sign on the upper right; otherwise, the card remained as it was.