Introduction to a New Era of Art
Imagine using your cell phone to find a series of latest artworks out of your favourite artist in real-life size from the comfort of your living-room. Or visiting the newest exhibit at your favourite museum, while strolling through a park. Over the past six years, this has turn into closer to being a reality as artists, curators, and auctioneers have increased their digital footprint to remain connected with their audiences, a connection that has turn into vital with social distancing and the closing of venues for events and exhibitions throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Rise of Immersive Technologies
Since 2014, there was a powerful resurgence of immersive or prolonged technologies (XR), from 360 video, allowing users to go searching and interact with spherical content; and virtual reality (VR), a 3D environment through which people can walk around and interact with the space and with virtual avatars; to augmented reality (AR), where 3D content is overlaid onto the user’s real-world environment, seen through a headset or a cell phone. While the early days of this latest wave of XR adoption were mainly driven by the gaming and entertainment industries, artists have been finding latest ways of expressing their art through XR, and museums and galleries have been increasingly experimenting with virtual mediums to share content with their audience.
Tools for Creative Expression
The availability of creative tools has made XR more accessible for artists, from Tilt Brush, a Paint-like tool to create art in three-dimensions, and Quill, to latest apps and software that facilitate animating 3D art in real-time by manipulating these objects in physical space. More functional, wearable XR hardware, comparable to the Oculus Quest, offers a high quality immersive experience with hand-tracking features in an untethered headset, providing a mobile, user-friendly experience.
Collaborations and Innovations
Jeff Koons collaborated with Snapchat, allowing the social media platform to create quick public art installations anywhere on the planet, democratising the art exhibit experience. Acute Art, an XR art production company, has recently partnered with Kaws and Olafur Eliasson to supply users with a set of works from the artists’ studios to be displayed in AR in their very own homes. Facebook, the owners of Oculus, recently announced that titles made for the Quest had grossed $100m within the last yr.
What is Next?
XR’s full potential guarantees to be revealed once it becomes easier to interact more naturally with this spatial medium, with the usage of lightweight eyewear and technologies like voice recognition and hand tracking. All this shall be powered by the widespread rollout of 5G connectivity. It is rumoured that Apple will release AR glasses in the following two years. Such a product from a brand with the track record and reach of Apple guarantees to revolutionise the best way we interact with XR content and convey this medium to the masses.
Future Use Cases
From there, there are a plethora of use cases. Underpinned by the incontrovertible fact that 4 tech giants—Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—are so heavily invested in XR as content and platform. Artists will have the option to curate their very own gallery experience, showcase their work and interact with the audience directly. Audiences will have the option to personalise their very own art exhibits and share them, as user-generated platforms emerge. Curators will have the option to supply a wide range of virtual galleries. Audiences will have the option to take part in virtual art auctions.
Emerging Trends
New virtual spaces will emerge, where users experience performance pieces, alone or with others. Volumetric capture—3D renditions of a subject—will result in more virtual recordings, performances and interactions with creators. Other advances comparable to artificial intelligence will help to know the audience’s behaviours and likes, and to create guided virtual tours led by realistic avatars enabling the audience to interact as they’d in real life.
Conclusion
It is all an issue of degree, of a an increasing number of seamless experience, and more intuitive navigation as increased download speed and genuinely wearable technology promise to make living with XR a more intuitive process. For the past five years, people working within the XR industry have been waiting impatiently for the “killer app” that takes the medium from a nice-to-have platform to a every day experience, taken with no consideration across the globe. It could also be that changes enforced by a worldwide pandemic prove to be the “app” that makes that quantum change in how the art world, and other industries, deliver a really revolutionary platform, and business model, for experiencing the world and the content that their users most care about.
