Does VR have a place in the world of art?

Virtual reality has a big place with art and artists in our current state of novelty within technology. Although somewhat cumbersome, there is an appeal to being able to fully submerge the viewer within your artwork. With VR, you can’t see the world around you, you only see what is being fed to you through your headset. This can have some novel and interesting applications for those who do have access to this kind of tech, provided you don’t mind stepping out of the real world to appreciate your art.

For some, removing the audience from reality might be the goal. In this case your art work becomes more of an occasional or once-off experience. Especially as it’s likely that it will only be accessible within a gallery setting for the duration of the exhibition. VR art is a novel and personal experience. The application is particularly pertinent to those artists wishing to express the disjointed alienation our tech-hungry society can feel. It’s almost an ironic way to portray how the tech which is designed to bring us closer together also leaves us feeling disjointed and alone.

What about Augmented Reality (AR) in art?

To fully appreciate the possibilities which augmented reality (AR) brings to you as an artist, it’s important to first fully comprehend what AR is, what Artivive does, and how Artivive puts the power of this endlessly expressive story-telling tool into your hands and into the lives of your audience.

According to Wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real-world are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory.

In other words, AR allows us to enhance the current environment or situation by enriching the audience’s perception through digitally enhanced stimulus.

AR allows the manipulator (or in this case the artist) to overlay the real world with layers of sensory information in order to alter the way it’s perceived. This includes additional, movable visual layers to stimulate what your audience sees, auditory layers which manipulate their perception through what they’re hearing (this is particularly interesting to those artists who draw on the emotional value of sound and music in their work to evoke deeper emotion and set the tone for what the audience is feeling when they view the artwork).

There are other aspects to AR, too, all of which will ultimately be available to you as an artist to quite literally augment the reality your audience experiences when they experience your work.

When visualizing the applications of AR in your artwork, it’s important to note that the overlaid sensory information with which you augment your work can be both constructive or destructive.

Either way, the sensory information you are layering over your artwork like another layer of paint is so seamlessly interwoven with the physical end canvas as to appear as if it’s actually changed — as it appears as an immersive aspect of the whole.

Wonderwoman by Litto

Your viewer’s ongoing perception of the real-world environment is being altered as they perceive it. This is a huge distinction from VR which, although it immerses the viewer in a simulated environment, does not give the perception of the real world shifting.

Augmented reality can be used to enhance your work with layers upon layers of live texture. This can be drawn from real world applications or it can be completely generated from yourself. The information is overlaid in exact alignment with where you actually are in space and time, giving an extremely life-like experience.

Disadvantages of Virtual Reality (VR) for art

Up until now the digital virtual playground has been dominated by VR (Virtual reality). AR creations can be experienced together. The application is enhancing the world the audience is in rather than placing you into a virtual one. VR may be able to place you in a simulated reality — but you will be there alone, and you will have to have some cumbersome tech stuck on your face to see it.

Wielding its power by the means of virtual headsets by Samsung, and fairly exclusive tech such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, the VR landscape may have entertained us, but it has also left us wanting something more human friendly.

One of the undeniable draw-backs of VR remains its exclusivity and cumbersome nature and therefore its lack of real-time application value for the man on the street, or the art lover in the gallery.

If you don’t have the right gear or tech, you have no access to the virtual experience.