2024-10-01
Reaching behind the glass: Fashion exhibition and social virtual reality
Publication
Publication
New media technologies, like social Virtual Reality, rapidly become applicable to more variety of fields, including cultural heritage. Museums, constantly challenged to increase interest in their collections, search for new ways to entertain and educate the broader public. This study explores the possibilities of using social Virtual Reality in exhibiting historical fashion. Social Virtual Reality fashion exhibition has the potential to improve user experience and visitors’ knowledge retention, by introducing elements difficult to provide in the traditional museum, like interactions and context. Interactions in social VR can be much more complex and context can be introduced more extensively, as the limits of the physical world do not apply to a virtual environment. Social VR can also provide a new method of "conservation". Placing scans of garments in social VR could create a possibility for curators to keep on researching the pieces after they are too fragile to be touched, without the risk of damaging them. This study includes a literature review on museum challenges and opportunities social VR could bring them, an expert survey confirming social VR’s value in fashion heritage sector, and a focus group with curators to establish design requirements. The results identify five main elements that should be taken into account: learning, user experience, emotions, context and vulnerability. Then the experience is created based on those results and an expert evaluation session is organised to investigate how to best use context in a social VR fashion exhibition. The meeting leads to the idea of contextual build-up, in which the environment gradually evolves from being similar to the physical space the participants are in, into an out-of-real-world setting. The whole research process adapts the human-centred approach, using mixed methods for collecting data and engaging experts in the field of cultural and fashion heritage, associated with institutions such as: the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, Centraal Museum Utrecht or European Fashion Heritage Association. The experience was designed incorporating three rooms of different contexts: modern museum, neutral space and historical house. The exhibition was created as a social experience, where two or more participants can interact with each other and with the exhibits. The object interactions performed by one of the visitors are visible to all of them. The exhibits shown in the exhibition are scans of real garments, and can be manipulated by the visitors via actions of rotation and scaling. These findings highlight social VR’s potential to revolutionize historic fashion exhibitions by enhancing engagement, storytelling and accessibility, while preserving artefacts for future research. The work identifies key design components such as learning, user experience, emotions, context, and vulnerability. It investigates how to integrate context effectively, suggesting a dynamic environment that evolves from familiar to fantastical settings, as well as benefits context brings to the experience. The results also demonstrate ways to incorporate interactive elements, which play a crucial role in enhancing user experience and learning.
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Z. Yumak (Zerrin) , Z. Yumak (Zerrin) , W. Hürst (Wolfgang) , I. Viola (Irene) , P.S. César Garcia (Pablo Santiago) | |
Universiteit Utrecht | |
Universiteit Utrecht | |
Organisation | Distributed and Interactive Systems |
Wylezek, K. (2024, October). Reaching behind the glass: Fashion exhibition and social virtual reality. |