Museums of the virtual future

3D technology, interpretation and practice

Technical practice gives a better understanding of an art. The visitors in the exhibition could experiment the creation of 3D graphics themselves on a computer at their disposal: practice on present-day software enables the visitors to visualize the interaction between geometry, technology and aesthetics that have made the history of VR – and of architecture. They experience a new view of art history, starting from cylinders and half-spheres to produce an image of Classical rotundas with circular colonnades and domes.

Various modes of presentation contextualize this combination of VR programmes running on machines, both professional finished projects and visitors’ experiments: they need to be supported by explanatory panels on the history and practice of CAD and VR, placing it in a historical context – 3D modelling dating back to Renaissance perspective. The panels also have to explain the main notions of 3D graphics: the creation of primitive forms associating geometry and art, the use of textures, lighting and perspective through the ‘camera eye’, and eventually animation. They show how the basic techniques of geometrical coordinates experimented by the visitors underlie, after much elaboration, the artistic finished products of VR that they can admire in the exhibition.

Virtual worlds such as Second Life, where the computing power and network capabilities required can be used for artistic purposes such as a live jazz performance broadcast internationally, also exemplify the interactive possibilities of VR.

Digital image aesthetics and the historical perspective

Films on the history of VR are shown, and here again media technology has to be harnessed so as to suggest the historical perspective, based on the practices of digital visualisation aesthetics; this involves cooperation between historians of IT and digital media technicians. Documentaries dating back to the early 1990 differ in pixel definition from cutting-edge trailers of new programmes, yet they have to appear on the same screen; videos on VR in medicine and videos on architecture are focused differently. The resulting films have to show both the similarity in techniques and the differences in purpose between documentaries in these various areas. A solution is to present the early films in a smaller format which makes pixelisation less visible, and surround them with a frame to recover the format of the larger films; the frame effect will in addition give them an old-fashioned air which will suggest the time perspective.

The museology of IT

The layout of the exhibition is meant to relate the various IT programmes presented. An option was to take advantage of the exhibition space – in our case, a linear two-nave 15th century building, in which a circuit was organized so as to trace the history of VR from its beginning to present-day supercomputers. The lighting is also of great importance, implying cooperation between the electricians specialised in museology and the historians of IT who are responsible for the exhibits, who need to learn to understand one another’s requirements so that the exhibition space is equipped and lit in order to throw into relief working machinery (not static objects as in other exhibitions).

Preservation for the future: augmented reality

An exhibition on simulation takes advantage of IT technologies, and in return it gives new options for developing these technologies.