Hands-On: ArtQuest VR Explores What Makes A Good Museum

What entices someone to visit a virtual museum rather than a physical one? ArtQuest VR might have an answer.

ArtQuest VR is a museum app allowing users to visit halls of paintings presented in true scale. Pulling from collections of famous museums around the world, visitors can enjoy exhibits arranged by artist, movement, or preset collection.

Inside The ArtQuest Museum

Opening ArtQuest VR directs you to your first gallery and presents a menu for exhibit navigation. The museum has options for choosing what art you want to see, gallery customization, and movement.

You can change the color and materials of the main wall, floor, and frames of the art you’re looking at. Adjustments can be made to frame thickness with a drop-down menu for framing styles. There is also an option for a text-to-speech voice to narrate each painting’s description and information with five different voices offered.

Moving around can either be done smoothly with the left joystick push or “blink” teleportation using the right joystick. The only turning option currently is snap turning. You can also use the menu to recalibrate your height so each painting is positioned at eye level.

Connecting With An Art Piece

I examined a painting by Wassily Kandinsky titled “Picture With A Black Arch”.

The height offset feature in ArtQuest allows visitors to elevate their stance, as if borrowing a ladder to view paintings from a higher vantage. I floated upwards along the canvas and examined the painting. “Picture With A Black Arch” is awash with quick brushstrokes and geometric shapes. What made the artist paint this? What did the accompanying description of “musical counterpoint” mean here?

I pantomimed painting in the air along with the artist himself, tracing my hand over the dark outlines first. I’m a painter myself, so I recognized thick brushstrokes meant a pause, or applied pressure on the canvas. Thinner strokes meant a more delicate hand. Short, harsh, lines meant faster application, especially several in a group at once. These particular brushstrokes all lean left, indicating Kandinsky painted with his right hand. I traced the marks in the air while listening to my favorite orchestral music.

What I found were hand movements that seemed to dance in the air with purposeful direction. It felt just like someone directing an orchestra while painting on a canvas. Checking a Google cultural site later that listed more information about the artwork, I remain pretty convinced that’s what Kandinsky was doing.

What Makes A Museum Attractive?

Virtual museums can be hard to build. You immediately discover the architecture surrounding the art relates to the pieces within. These digital spaces benefit from thoughtful immersive design. That means ambient sounds and building for how someone will walk around the space you’ve designed. How about a lobby to pause and reflect on what’s been seen? Neither ambient audio nor lobby are present in ArtQuest VR, and I’d love to see these added.

The advantage of ArtQuest VR, though a bit lonely without other visitors and plain in presentation, is that I can go and see a near-entire collection of Van Gogh or Matisse, and I don’t have to download gigabytes of information to do it nor compete with anyone else for the perfect spot. The app has the feel of a spatial website and a functioning museum with an exclusive collection of work.

ArtQuest VR’s architecture is simple with a slight neoclassical style and descriptions that appear sourced from Wikipedia. The neoclassical architecture matches Wikipedia’s site design, but it still feels like something is missing without the ambient sound. You simply pop into the gallery once the app is open. At least one art collection featured missing textures. As I browsed the contemporary art wing, a recent Banksy piece returned an ugly floating pink square to indicate the sourced artwork was no longer there. A picture featuring a mural by Shepard Fairey rotated itself in the wrong direction after sitting right-side-up for a few seconds.

I noted some additional bugs attempting to access my Quest menu and teleporting too far into the wall moving between galleries. The most notable issue, perhaps, is when paintings don’t appear at high resolution until your face is practically centimeters from the artwork. Also, sometimes, there are duplicate paintings that appear in a gallery with no explanation why.

ArtQuest VR’s Opportunity

It’s a well-held myth that art is about perfection and not the journey it takes to get there. If this were true, museums wouldn’t show the early work of artists they feature. Viewing famous paintings chronologically in an app such as ArtQuest VR can show how art is just as much about failure as it is about success. Each artist has their own story in how they reach that success, and it’s up to each visitor to reflect on that and how they can adapt this lesson to their lives.

How can ArtQuest VR keep building on this? Every museum visitor is looking for something when they visit. Can VR bring them the very human effort of outdoing oneself through practice, improvement and sudden inspiration? That’s not always present in the room with us in a physical museum. Seeing things from new angles is precisely VR’s power, and there’s an opportunity for an app like ArtQuest to help see more context around a specific piece of art each time someone walks through the front door.