From a Dedicated Space to VR at Home — How VR for Culture Is Distributed? (Part 2.)
Exploring Industry’s Insights to Make the Future of Immersion in Museums.
[In this new series of article, I’ll share precious insights from key actors of the immersion + museum field to understand the underlying foundations of it all.]
When you start discussing with museum professionals about their experience with VR artworks, you quickly hear the same song. It takes too much time and team resources for an experience which is not for everyone. They start to detail the costs related to the introduction of the technology, the mediation of the experience, the tech-support to install and then maintain the equipment, the sanitary gestures to put in place, and the long queues it generates. This last point forcing creatives to produce short experiences while impactful and transformative experience should never be rushed.
On the other side, museums have huge costs and bet on ticket sales to find a certain financial balance. These museums welcome as many people as possible and can’t invest so much in a temporary or permanent experience which will please only a few visitors. Let’s remember that the Louvre Museum needs to welcome more than 150/200 visitors per hour to not lose money (in a regular non-COVID setting of course).
The challenge of democratising VR so it can finally reach out to bigger audiences is at the heart of the industry’s discussions.
We face a wall where the different stakeholders try to adapt to the conditions and often to the loss of quality.
Some say VR producers should provide the exhibition as an all.
In this case, museums can sell tickets to the experience as they sell tickets for temporary exhibitions. Offering a room-scale experience goes beyond the VR headsets hanging from the ceiling and can welcome a great number of visitors at the same time. In these projects, the immersive experience can begin with various content using different displays or technologies. In this context, the story can be told in different steps and the visit is longer. This is the model followed by Marshmallow Laser Feast, BeyondProjects, and others.
Some others say VR should be experienced at home.
At home, spectators have time to dive in the new universe and fully embody the experience offered.
In this new COVID-10 reality, bringing events and entertainment at home via VR is be a fantastic opportunity to reach audiences. Concerts at home have been spreading during the 2020’s lock-down. During the Fête de la Musique you could enter a psychedelic virtual universe created by Jean-Michel Jarre and his team to enjoy a very unique and impressive 1-hour show “Alone Together”.
In an interview for the Financial Times in May 2020, the director of Sony Kenichiro Yoshida said that their goal is to offer shows at home as immersive as in a concert hall. Fortnite hasn’t waited much to become a virtual concert venue and welcome more than 27 millions of spectators for the show of Travis Scott.
While the main barrier today for experiencing VR at home is the market adoption rate, Diversion Cinema works on an innovative model in collaboration with the Phi Center in order to make global their Montreal-based offer “VR To Go”.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=597664384504479
The concept offers individuals to rent out headsets directly from the Centre Phi and have them delivered at home and picked up 48 hours later through bike or electric car to stay green!
The ticket costs 40$ via pickup and 60$ with delivery. Individuals have access to an Occulus Go headset with a multimedia player designed by the Centre Phi to ensure an easy adoption, with a catalogue of 10 immersive films from the museum, often renewed.
Good to notice that Centre PHI takes great care of hygiene measures to the process and everything gets packed in contactless bags. They also provide a mode d’emploi explaining what to do to avoid contact and stay safe.
[update 20/12/2020] You can now also rent VR headsets and have them delivered home with the access to a large catalogue of immersive artworks in Europe with immersiVR powered by Synthesis Gallery and INVR.
Some say VR should be experienced in dedicated space.
This works on a different business model where time is not a lever to be reduced at its maximum.
During a roundtable organised at Museum Connections 2020 in Paris (listen to the podcast here) and during the online meetup organised by Vastari on August 19th: “Navigating New Distribution Models For Virtual Reality Experiences”, the team from Diversion Cinema explained that they been creating and testing various types of spaces to distribute VR. In solo, multi-player, in a dedicated space or on-site experiences, options are multiple.
Four years ago, they opened a VR Cinema with 8 seats and 8 VR headsets. The business model worked via ticketing at the entrance — 15€ the ticket to access 30 minutes of VR experience. Two years ago, they made it more mobile and started to distribution on-site VR Experience in festival, museums or cultural spaces. Today, Diversion Cinema has a collaboration with the Cinema Le Forum des Images in Paris ‘The VR Saturdays’. Every Saturday, they offer a VR programmation. They had to align the price of the entrance ticket to the traditional cinema prices: 7€ for 30 minutes of VR experience.
However, “360° videos are currently the easiest work to exhibit because the headset needed is the cheapest (around 200€) and is all-one and to be connected to the computer or the wifi.
“Within one hour, you can start enjoying VR with your own headset. Everyone agile with a smartphone can do it.”
“Interactive VR needs a VR-ready computer (most often gaming computers with efficient graphic card), a VR headset and optionally some captors to place in the room. Also, an empty 10sqm space should be available for the experience itself.”
This is the model developed by the Virtual Reality Cabinet at the Natural History Museum of Paris, the Palais de Tokyo and soon, the permanent VR room of the Gaîté Lyrique.
