VR Gallery

A glimpse on the final work :)

1. Introduction

Hundreds years ago, gallery was an important place for people who want to get touch with arts.

Nowadays, young customers have so many options to engage in art, visiting a gallery became their last few options when talking about art. Apart from that, art market hasn’t found a good way to go online in this digital era. Because of these, more galleries are closed due to the fewer customers.

Therefore, this project wants to develop a new gallery experience that includes VR technology to bring the independent small art collectives to a broader audience and to encourage purchases.

Main Problem

• Younger customers has too many alternative options rather than visiting a gallery.

• Art market hasn’t find a good way to go online in this digital era.

• More galleries are closed because of fewer customers.

Design Goal

Developing a new gallery experience that includes VR technology to bring the independent small art collectives to a broader audience and to encourage purchases.

2. Analysis

The analysis phase consists of researching on three aspects: human, technology, and business. Different methods were used to obtain results from different perspectives.

Analysis Strategy

Methods Used

• Literature reviews

• Contextual inquires

• Interviews

• Emotion Capture Cards

• Storyboard

• Business canvas

• Customer journey

2.1. Research on Human aspect

During the research on human aspect, I interviewed several artists from the GSA. Apart from that, I went to several galleries in Den Haag. From the observation, a storyboard was drawn.

Currently, people may search on the internet to explore interesting places and travel to the desired gallery. But the experience often starts with the third picture. They see the gallery on the street and start glancing through the windows. Then they go inside and browsing around to see different artworks. After that, they leave the gallery. People often stay in a gallery for a very short time, less than 5 minutes.

From the research, a user profile was pictured. This is Maria, age 32. and she is a café owner. Her experience on gallery is “she seldom intentionally plans to visit a gallery, but she likes visiting exhibitions and buy derivatives she really likes.” I was targeting the middle-class people, normally aged between 20 to 40 years old. They are novice to art, but they are explorative and adaptive. Besides, they are normally social networker. Who likes to share experience with their friends.

2.2. Research on Technology aspect

To build a VR gallery, we also need to digitize the artworks from the artists. From the analysis, I made a diagram based on purchase preference and difficulties of 3d scanning. From the diagram we will focus on painting and drawings, and sculptures with distinct shapes.

2.3. Research on Business aspect

A modern customer journey was drawn to check what the gallery could do to improve the experience in different stages. For example, current gallery is lack of post-purchase experience, so we can think what we can provide to the customers even after their purchase, so they will return and became a loyal customer.

Desired Experience

From the analysis, I envisioned that the envisioned new gallery will offer a more approachable way of visiting a gallery. The novice art buyers should feel comfortable to enter the café-like gallery, where they can explore different forms of interactions with VR HMD devices to have continuous stimulation. Furthermore, after the experience, they should be motivated to spread the word. They should be offered possibilities to schedule next visit or glancing desired artworks online.

The detailed of the design requirements can be found in the report.

3. Conceptualization

From the desired user experience, I have three key elements wanted to integrate in the final concept, which is approachable, emotions and purchase. Therefore, three concepts were created focusing on each element.

Conceptualization Strategy

For conceptualization, a co-creation session with three designers was conducted.

3.1. APPROACHABLE Concept 1: Stories behind the paintings

Since these are the interim concepts, to get a quick prototype, I prototyped them in 2D instead of 3D.

The first concept is called 'Stories Behind the Paintings'. It is focused on helping viewer to know the stories behind each artwork. When you take on the VR device, you will firstly see a virtual gallery similar to the real gallery.

3.2. EMOTIONS Concept 2: Adventurous Collection

One of the big barriers that many galleries can hardly attract visitors is their lack of interesting stimulations. Visitors couldn’t find many things that can stimulate their interests to explore in the current gallery for a longer time. Therefore,they always leave the gallery within five minutes, which lower the chance they will purchase. Hence this concept intensifies the emotions (amazement & curiosity) to continuing stimulates users’ interests to explore the virtual gallery.

3.3. PURCHASE Concept 3: Find your perfect art piece for your home!

Another important problem for current gallery is the low conversion rate. This was caused by various reasons: vague price, too high price, doesn’t know how to buy, doesn’t know

whether the art piece suits, etc. Many visitors visit the gallery without having intention to buy anything. Some of them may have the confusion on whether a gallery is a place to exhibit or to sell artworks. In this concept, it focuses on helping customers to find their suitable art piece for their home and encourage purchases. It is designed into an obvious commercial space that sells artworks, so that customers have the feeling that they are here to purchase.

3.4. Concepts Validation

Test Setup:

• Duration: ±30 minutes

• Concept test: C1, C2, C3

• Participants: 10 people

• Scenario: Visiting a gallery without purchasing plan

• Materials: Paper prototypes, Sticky Notes, Miniature model of gallery, Phone for immersive video, VR Cardboard, questionnaire afterwards

Goal: To understand how intuitive each of the concepts are and what users like and dislike about them, in order to compare the three concepts.

Paper prototypes

Miniature model of the new gallery

Concept 1 and concept 3 both have a clear and logical narrative, and they are most related to purchasing artworks in virtual environment. They have different directions and focus points, which are both considered to be in line with the design goal. Therefore, most elements from these two concepts will be considered integrating into the final concept.

Although concept 2 were the most favourable concept, mainly because its interesting setting and attractive virtual environments. Users would pay more attention to enjoy the virtual environment and interactions, forgetting they were here to purchase some artworks.

3.5. Conceptualization – final concept elements

After analysis the results from evaluation, I concluded 6 elements that should exist in the final design concept:

1. Gallery-like environment

2. Training / warm-up session

3. 360-degree video of artists

4. Explorative elements

5. A way they can see how the artworks look in a home environment rather than in the virtual gallery

6. The postcard including shopping information (post-experience service)

4. Prototyping

The process of prototyping includes 4 phases of below:

The final concepts were differentiate with 2 Gallery interactions.

5. Evaluation

The evaluation phase consisted of two parts: The first one is evaluation on excluding

the VR home scene from the final concept. This was done because of the doubt of whether a home scene in VR gallery would help users make decisions to buy artworks. The result showed that An AR application would be more helpful than using the VR gallery.

The second evaluation is the user tests on the functional prototype of VR gallery. Two gallery concepts were developed, which were identical in the environment, but different from the interactions on performing six certain functions. The order of the testing galleries was random to prevent bias on one gallery. There were four parts of the analysis of the results. From the results, the VR gallery achieved the requirements of the desired experience to some extent.

A within subject experiment was conducted. Which means each participant experience dboth concepts, the order was changed for half of them.

User Test

• Participants: 8+1 Pilot

• Age: 50% (20-25) + 50% (25-29) + Pilot (25-29)

• Gender: 4 female + 4 male + 1 female pilot

• Test duration: 40 ± mins

The participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire before and after the tests.

6. Conclusion

Looking back to the Desired Experience I wanted to achieve in the beginning:

The envisioned new gallery will offer a more approachable way of visiting a gallery. The novice art buyers should feel comfortable to enter the café-like gallery, where they can explore different forms of interactions with VR HMD devices to have continuous stimulation. Furthermore, after the experience, they should be motivated to spread the word. They should be offered possibilities to schedule next visit or glancing desired artworks online.

In conclusion, the VR gallery did offer a more approachable way of visiting a gallery, it gave the users opportunities to view artworks in different perspectives. Novice users are more encouraged to spend time in the gallery. The postcard and the AR app increased the possibility of making purchase decisions after visiting a VR gallery.

There are still steps need to be taken to complete the concept from both a technical perspective and a design perspective. Further developments and adjustments will enrich the user experience, and desired user experience can be realized better.

Limitation

• Limited access to the real user group

• Limitation of the design iteration and Validation

• Limitation of the project scope

One of the obstacles in the project is to get in touch with the user group, especially for non-Dutch speaking people like the researcher. The VR gallery was designed mainly facing Dutch locals, therefore the research about galleries and user characteristics were mainly from literature reviews. Although inquiry research was conducted, the sample sizes were not big, and there was not much verbal communication with the gallery visitors due to the language barrier. The user profiles and storyboards can be more explicit and convincing if more people from the target group join in the research activity and provide detailed information about their purchasing behaviors.

Due to limitations in time and resources, it is not feasible to carry out a real gallery visiting experience for the design iteration and the evaluation of the final concept.

Instead, evaluation sessions with peer students and concept tests with users were conducted during the design stage to check the effect of certain features and people’s likelihood of use. User tests were conducted for the final evaluation. Although miniature models and introduction briefing can help the users understand the scenario better. The testing place is still different from a real pop-up gallery. The result of the final evaluation shows that the concept meets the design goal, but there are still things that need to be tested in a real-life context and during real experience.

For now, the project only focuses on the experience inside the VR gallery. However, when looking at the desired user experience, it’s not only about the experience in the virtual environment, but the whole journey of purchasing experience. This design should not be limited to the interactions in the virtual environment, it should be about every stage of visiting a gallery.

Recommendation

• More guidance of use for better understandings

• More artworks implemented and change over time to time

• Consistent designs

• More validations in real gallery

7. Reflection

• An eye-open experience on art field

• Personal vision on helping the traditional industry to adapt to the new digital world

• Every small step counts

• Unnecessary to present perfect prototypes

8. Video and Image Gallery

Full Thesis for Reading