Virtual reality with art
By: Ray Ram Chuhan
Tags: Virtual Reality, Museums, Future, Technology, Art

I worked in museums & art galleries for over 9 years and thought about many things just looking at paintings and exhibitions. One thing I would love to see is to see exhibitions and art works preserved in virtual reality. A lot of people used to arrive too late and missed a few exhibitions and art works. They travelled far just to see some of them and it made me feel bad that they could not see them. We had about 9 or 10 separate galleries and every 2–3 months some of the rooms were changed and exhibitions and art works were replaced with work from different artists.

This was necessary as it was called an exhibition change over and people usually get bored with visiting the galleries & seeing the same work repeatedly. People like variety and that is understandable when deciding to visit galleries and public places. Reading the same book again and again is quite boring for most people, so seeing the same works might be boring as well.

I mentioned this to a lot of people but sometimes implementing the idea has got to be done by someone or a group with the right resources and enough passion to make it successful.

Now imagine, instead of just having 9–10 exhibition rooms we could have 900–1000 or more exhibition rooms preserved in Virtual Reality from the same building. We could easily put on our headsets, VR glasses or whatever will be available in the future and walk through our local or favourite galleries. We could have have virtual gift shops where people can purchase what they want from thousands of exhibitions available and the artists can be rewarded in royalties and then create more art. The items, such as post cards, posters, stationary or whatever people would like to purchase could be stored in places such as warehouses (like Amazon, Argos, Asda etc) and people could have jobs packing and posting the items to wherever. Postal companies could create more jobs and revenue through thousands of museums & galleries available in our countries. The galleries could advertise their forthcoming exhibits and other local events or even shops in VR and be rewarded through them. Even the local events and shops could be in VR where we can select and purchase as we please. Art is many things and not just paintings and art objects, there could be art works in dance and music or even short movies or documentaries.

We can still visit the galleries in person if we wish to as they are important for society to meet and share ideas. Even chatting to multiple people or groups could be available one day through virtual reality, I prefer conversations in reality myself but maybe with the right technology it could change my mind. It would be necessary to keep the galleries so we can record the exhibitions in virtual reality and each art gallery has their own unique qualities that we aren’t prepared to lose yet.

This I think is a great idea and could be available soon if someone is passionate enough about it. I’ve thought about this for years but sometimes we think far ahead of our times. Now I think the resources are available, we just need the right people who are passionate about it, hopefully someone studying media or marketing is going to read this.

I’m a bit obsessed with technology, especially what we could do with it and how it can help people. We are all at home trying to figure out how we can do things and VR seems to be a good resource. I think my next post will be about virtual reality too.

Thanks for reading

RR