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An Immersive Virtual Reality Museum via Second Life Extending Art

Appreciation from 2D to 3D

Conference Paper in Communications in Computer and Information Science · June 2014

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07857-1_102

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 An Immersive Virtual Reality Museum via Second Life
Extending Art Appreciation from 2D to 3D

Yu-Chun Huang1 and Sooyeon Rosie Han2

1
Department of Design, Tatung University, Taipei, Taiwan
[email protected]
2
College of Environment Design, University of California, Berkeley, USA
[email protected]

Abstract. This research is going to demonstrate a virtual museum via second

life, the visitors can have the chance to more profoundly experience the
masterpieces. By extending 2D paintings to 3D world, users can be not only
more adaptively perceive the expression of painting but also intuitively interact
with the 2D famous painting in 3D world. Also this kind of art appreciation can
play a profound contribution to the art education especially for children. By
using game-like navigation around the virtual art gallery, children can receive
deeper impression and be more interested in this immersive art museum than
traditional one.

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Human-Computer Interaction.

1 Introduction

In 1973, with the development of computer, the term—HCI (human-computer

interaction) began to emerged into our life. HCI involving the study, planning and
design of the interaction between people (users) and computers, causes great impact
in different fields (Card et al., 1986). On the other hand, cyberspace, as the
information space has been dubbed by William Gibson in his 1984 novel—
Neuromancer (Ace Books, New York), has become accessible in the 1990s through
the World Wide Web. Cyberspace has quickly become more than just another means
of communication: online shopping, online education…etc have become part of our
everyday lives (Kalay, 2006).
Mitchell (1995) mentioned that as our bodies morph into cyborgs, the buildings
that house them are also transforming. Gradually, telecommunication systems replace
circulation systems, and the digital information decomposes traditional building types.
Physical world gradually merges with virtual world. Our physical living environment
is evolving with the development of virtual space. Therefore virtual space has become
an important issue in the end of 20th century.
The virtual space can be separated into two categories: simulation space, which is
generated by computer and represented through devices like computer monitor, head-
mounted display, VR cave (Iovine, 1995; Kalawsky, 1993; Mitchell, 1995); the other

C. Stephanidis (Ed.): HCII 2014 Posters, Part I, CCIS 434, pp. 579–584, 2014.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
580 Y.-C. Huang and S. Rosie Han

is cyberspace, where we communicate with others from all over the world (Wertheim,
1999). Simulation space is often used for observation and evaluation of landscape by
city planners, designers, engineers, developers, and administrators (Soubra, 2008;
Dawood et al., 2009; Yabuki et al., 2011).
In 1999, Philip Rosedale established Linden Lab. He combined these two features
of virtual space and made “Second Life (SL)” [1], which is a developing computer
hardware allowing people to immerse in a virtual world. In SL, users (called
Residents) can interact with each other through avatars. They can socialize,
participate individual and group activities and create 3D artifacts, buildings, and
social spaces where people interact [2].
Given the features of SL as a social interface allowing multi-users to participate
daily activities as well as real life, SL became popular and was used for education
(Boulos et al., 2007), science evaluation, and arts fields, such as the virtual museum
and art gallery (Urban, 2007; Zhu, 2007). On the other sides, regarding to the web
museums, visitors have become accustomed to clicking on images displayed in their
browser or retrieve pre-written textual descriptions of cultural heritage objects
(Sumption, 2006). Therefore in order to create a more accessible and convenient
virtual museum, researchers have built the virtual museum in SL, such as “The
Bayside Beach Galleria Museum of Contemporary Art [3] (Urban, 2007)”, “A Virtual
Gallery (Oberlander et al., 2008)”.

2 Problem and Objective

However, the art displays of those museums I mentioned above were just copied from
traditional museum and re-build it into SL. Sometimes it is not as easy as traditional
museum for user to get used to it. Users have to learn how to control the SL interface
and recognize the orientation in the virtual world and then navigate in SL. On the
other sides, in the art display of physical museum, visitors always stand in front of the
wall to appreciate 2D painting, also in virtual museum, visitors have to control their
avatars to appreciate 2D painting. It is difficult for users to perceive the same feelings
that artists would like to express. Therefore the concept of this research is to represent
a more immersive virtual museum by extending 2D painting to 3D painting via SL.
By using SL platform, visitor is able to break limitations of physical world to soar,
jump, swim or become a goliath to navigate around the museum. In this museum,
users are able to get into the paintings; it means the 2D painting can be visualized in
3D world (see Fig 1). And every individual painting can be properly connected with
each other through story telling. There are two different themes in this museum: the
European Art and the Asian Art. In this research, we are going to present Asian Art
gallery as an example of extending 2D painting to 3D painting.
 An Immersive Virtual Reality Museum via Second Life 581

Fig. 1. Comparison of art appreciation

3 Implementation

In order to create a more immersive way to appreciate arts, we collected some

important paintings from Asian Art, and used the narrative way to connect it.
Therefore the methodology can be divided into three parts: the first step, artwork
selection from famous museums; the second step, scenario demonstration; the third
step, framework of virtual museum.

Fig. 2. Art collections: a) Chinese painting—“Landscape: tea sipping under willows”; b)

Chinese painting—“Moonlit Pavilion in the Mountains”; c) Buddha painting—“Buddha
Enthroned on a Mat of Kusa Grass”; d) Japanese painting—“Murasaki Shikibu”; e) Chinese
painting—“The Peach Festival of the Queen Mother of the West”; f) Chinese painting—“ Hell
Story: mirror of retribution”.
582 Y.-C. Huang and S. Rosie Han

Fig. 3. Scenario demonstration: A) User walked to the willows and appreciated painting—
“Landscape: tea sipping under willows”. And she sat down around the tea table to virtually
experience Chinese tea; B) She got into the landscape and appreciated the second Chinese
painting—“Moonlit Pavilion in the Mountains”. And then she follow the paths and climbed to
the pavilion; D) she found a Chinese table, chair, and two paintings, one is on the table and the
other is on the wall. As to the painting on the wall—“Murasaki Shikibu” which displayed a
Japanese woman lying on the riverside and enjoying the moonlight; E) Suddenly the virtual
world turned to the night time. She wanted to get into this Japanese painting; F) After clicking
the left button of the painting, she suddenly transferred herself to the riverside; G) she clicked
the left button and transferred her to the needle mountain and lava hell, H) The bridge implied,
people who have done many bad things before die, they cannot safely go across the bridge; H)
Finally she meet the Buddha painting—“Buddha Enthroned on a Mat of Kusa Grass” after
passing the bridge.

Scenario Demonstration of Asian Art Museum

This gallery includes five different styles painting: landscape painting, portrait
painting, flower-and-bird painting, hell painting, and Buddha painting. Also, the
classification is followed by Chinese traditional water painting. The scenario of this
virtual museum was described as below.
The virtual museum began from a Chinese painting—“Landscape: tea sipping
under willows” (fig 2a). Visitor controlled the avatar and walked to the willows to sit
on the virtual tea table and enjoy sipping tea with other avatars (fig 3A). And then she
got into the landscape and appreciated the second Chinese painting—“Moonlit
Pavilion in the Mountains” (fig 2b). Subsequently he recognized a Chinese garden
behind the painting and a paths connecting to the pavilion of hill (fig 3B). Therefore
she walked into the garden paths and climbed up to the pavilion (fig 3C). After
 An Immersive Virtual Reality Museum via Second Life 583

arriving to the pavilion hill, she found a Chinese table, chair, and two paintings, one is
on the table (fig 2e) and the other is on the wall (fig 3D). The painting on the wall—
“Murasaki Shikibu” (fig 2d) displayed a Japanese woman lying on the riverside and
enjoyed the moonlight (fig 3E). Suddenly the virtual world turned to the night time.
She wanted to experience the same scene from Japanese painting. After she clicked
the left button of the painting, she suddenly transferred herself to the riverside (fig
3F). The hell painting—“Hell Story: mirror of retribution” (fig 2f) which was hung on
the roof attracted the user to get into it. Hence she clicked the left button and
transferred her to the needle mountain and lava hell (fig 3G). And then she found a
bridge in front of her. She tried to keep safely going across a bridge (fig 3H). The
bridge implied, people who have done many bad things before die, they cannot safely
go across the bridge. At the same time the user safely go across the bridge, but there
are many other users who fall down the needle mountain. Finally the user met the
Buddha painting—“Buddha Enthroned on a Mat of Kusa Grass” (fig 2c, fig 3I) and a
big golden Buddha was appearing in front of her.

4 Conclusion Remarks

Through the scenario demonstration of the virtual museum, the visitors had the
chance to more profoundly experience the masterpieces. By extending 2D paintings to
3D world, users can be not only more adaptively perceive the expression of painting
but also intuitively interact with the 2D famous painting in 3D world.
This kind of art appreciation can play a profound contribution to the art education
especially for children. By using game-like navigation around the virtual art gallery,
children can receive deeper impression and be more interested in this immersive art
museum than traditional one. Although there are some contributions on the child
education, however, the interface of SL is still another problem, which people have to
learn how to use it before controlling it. Sometimes, it is not easy to use for most
beginners. On the other sides, this research just creates a new form of art display in
virtual museum via SL. In the future, if we can combine more intuitive HCI interface,
such as “body sensor” into this virtual space, it would become more accessible and
adaptable for every visitors.

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