Labyrinths: Reimagining Exhibition Platforms for Artists in Virtual Reality (original) (raw)

2019, 2019 Motion Design Education Summit

Since its earliest inceptions in the late 1960s, Virtual Reality has long promised more immersive media experiences. With the introduction of Oculus VR hardware in 2012, VR technologies have reached new inflection points of access and availability. Ubiquitously available real- time graphics and gaming software, advancements in rendering hardware, and app-store distribution channels are spurring widespread innovation and development in the realms of AR and VR experience design. This paper examines how a team of faculty and students across multiple institutions worked together to create a controller-less, procedurally generated VR exhibition platform for electronic, time-based media art. Our VR exhibition platform proposes a use case in collaborative design and a model for electronic art exhibition, independent of controller-based VR navigational hardware interfaces. Our platform utilizes a procedurally generated, real-time graphical environment as a foundation for a scalable exhibition space in the form of an expansive labyrinth. In its initial implementation, the works of twenty-two artists working in various forms of electronic time-based media and computer animation were exhibited in a VR exhibition titled Labyrinths. Because of the high graphical demands presented by computer animation and other forms of interactive electronic time-based media,Labyrinths utilized a custom built procedural platform in the Unity 3D gaming engine. Faculty and Students from Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University, the New School, Lehman College, and Stevens Institute of Technology collaborated with independent artists and game designers to create exhibition content, while the platform itself was built by students at Yale University’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. The Labyrinths exhibition platform presents an innovative model for exhibition design, artistic collaboration, and artist collectives who work in electronic time-based media, motion graphics, and interactive design.