The Daily Telegraph

Are you ready to immerse yourself in virtual galleries?

Major institutio­ns are now venturing into VR – and it’s more than just a gimmick, as Lucy Davies discovers on a journey back in time

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‘Put your head in the furnace,” says the voice in my ear. “Go on, right in.” Kneeling down, I try, but unfortunat­ely shoving my face through the cast-iron door and into the glowing mass of red-hot charcoal briquettes proves tricky. I should say that the stove isn’t real, but try telling my brain that. I can feel a warmth on my leg and behind me, through an open window, I can see heavy clouds rolling over the unmistakab­le grey rooftops of Paris. A piece of paper on the table flutters in the breeze. Empty bottles lie on a grubby couch. Smoke from a Gitane in the ashtray spirals towards a crack in the ceiling, and rain dripped steadily into a waiting bucket.

What I am witnessing is a recreation of the artist Amedeo Modigliani’s studio via the medium of virtual reality (VR). Donning a headset, I am whisked from the north London studio of award-winning gaming company Preloaded in the present day to Rue de la Chaumuière in the Montparnas­se area of Paris in around 1919.

Created for Tate Britain’s new Modigliani exhibition, this immersive journey back in time is the gallery’s first venture into VR. The Tate’s decision to enter the VR fray marks a watershed moment for the medium’s use in museums and galleries, which up to now has been somewhat tentative.

Certainly, the Modigliani experience impressive­ly shows what can be done with the technology; if my destinatio­n isn’t real, it is authentic. Every doorknob and window catch, every floorboard, every lick of paint, and even the types of tack used to fix canvases to frames, have been verified via first-hand accounts, photograph­s and the like. “It’s imagined,” says Nancy Ireson, curator, “but it’s a reliable imagining.”

And it has a point beyond mere novelty. The creative milieu of Paris, to which Modigliani moved from Italy in 1906, aged 22, was vital to his art. He started out, like many would-be artists, in the vibrant but increasing­ly chichi quarter of Montmartre, but relocated quickly to Montparnas­se, then the favoured haunt of the avant garde.

He had several studios here, but Tate has chosen to recreate the one in which he made his final painting, where he was also found exhausted and frozen (that stove can’t have been so hot), in the arms of his lover, Jeanne Hébuterne, in the winter of 1920. He

The detail is incredible – it has an immediacy that can make you feel quite overcome

died of tubercular meningitis a few days later, aged 35, whereupon Jeanne threw herself out of the window, killing herself and her unborn child.

If that weren’t devastatin­g enough, at the time, Modigliani was finally gaining recognitio­n. He had begun to sell his works, and had embarked on a self-portrait that would present him to the world as a bona fide artist. Yet here he was, decaying, in this damp, cramped space.

“You feel that tension,” says Ireson, who worked alongside Hilary Knight, Tate’s head of digital content, on the VR experience. “The practicali­ties of trying to produce art while you’re coughing, drinking, living in a mess. We think of artists in their garret and it can be quite a romantic idea. This takes the romance away completely. It’s very levelling.”

Because most visitors will not have tried VR before, great attention has been paid to making the experience “as frictionle­ss as possible,” says Knight. Instead of being required to walk around, you are seated, though the position of the chair moves twice, to allow you to see different parts of the studio. Believe me, you’ll want to – the detail is incredible. It has an immediacy that can make you feel quite overcome.

Up to now, the use of VR by museums and galleries has been more prosaic. Typically, it has meant using a 3D 360-degree camera to replicate a visit online, or producing a super high-resolution 3D image of a painting, where users can zoom in over the surface to savour every stroke.

But now major institutio­ns are bringing VR into the galleries. Alongside the Tate, next month the Royal Academy will present its first foray into VR, in which four Academicia­ns – Yinka Shonibare, Jonathan Yeo, Farshid Moussavi and Humphrey Ocean – have used Google’s Tilt Brush software and an HTC Vive headset to create 3D works in a virtual space.

Meanwhile, the V&A, which acquired an Oculus Rift VR kit headset as early as 2014, before it was officially released, is already engaging with how VR has impacted the design world, and students have been invited to trial VR at special events.

Public appetite for VR in exhibition­s is certainly there. In 2015, the British Museum put on a VR weekend where visitors could enter a Bronze Age roundhouse and interact with 3D scans of contempora­neous objects. Several thousand people turned up – the experience is now part of its education centre.

Then, earlier this year, the Natural History Museum joined forces with Google and Framestore (the visual effects company behind films such as Gravity and Fantastic Beasts) to create two experience­s in which prehistori­c beasts come back to life from fossils. In one, a 23ft sea mammal grows muscles, veins and skin, peels off the wall and swims around the gallery. I closed my eyes at one point, but perhaps I’m not the target audience.

“What we’ve found,” says Mike Mcgee, Framestore’s co-founder and chief creative officer, “is that kids, brought up on wireless music and swipe technology, will put on the headset and just dive in. They want to reach out and grab things. When I show this to older people, they are almost frozen. You have to physically turn them around to show them there are images behind them. Once they get it, though, once the jaw drops, off they go.”

Another of Framestore’s projects suggests to what remarkable places we might be headed, turning an American school bus in Washington DC turned into a giant VR headset. As the bus drove around, when the children looked out of the window, instead of the city, they saw the surface of Mars. It was mapped so accurately, that every turn the bus made, every accelerati­on and decelerati­on, every pothole they bumped over, was reflected in the sound and visuals.

Sadly, it was a one-time “field trip”, produced for a science expo – you can see a video of it online – “but imagine,” says Mcgee, “what you could do with [that level of VR technology] in a museum? Go to the bottom of the ocean, see the Eiffel Tower being built, experience Henry VIII’S court. You could seat your visitor next to Vermeer in his studio, watch a painting come to life, see his model on the couch. We’re not far away from that.”

‘Kids brought up on wireless music and swipe technology will put on the headset and just dive in’

You might be thinking how costly this sounds – should museums be spending their paltry resources on such technology? But VR platforms are so keen to see what their tech can do, that companies such as HTC Vive, Google and now Facebook are partnering with museums for free.

Unsurprisi­ngly, the encroach of such technology has raised concerns for some. “Will VR kill museums?” was the title of one paper I found online. “The thing that none of us should want to do is just create VR versions of our museums,” says Chris Michaels, digital director of London’s National Gallery. “So much of going to a museum is about being there with other people; about being in the presence of a particular artwork.”

Rather, it’s about using VR to enhance, not replace, the traditiona­l gallery experience. Ironically, the technology may also help to focus visitors away from other less edifying technology. “Everyone has a phone in their hands, and any museum director will tell you they’re struggling to get visitors to look up from those phones,” says Michaels. But, he says, for all VR’S promise, there’s still a long way to go before the arts world gets to grips with its full potential. “We’re at least a decade away from VR technology being mainstream. This whole sector is still figuring itself out.”

Modigliani is at Tate Modern from Thurs until April 2 2018. Tickets: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk

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 ??  ?? Dive in: a prehistori­c sea creature ‘swims’ the corridors at the National History Museum, main and above
Dive in: a prehistori­c sea creature ‘swims’ the corridors at the National History Museum, main and above
 ??  ?? Paint a picture: VR provides visitors with an insightful and enjoyable experience
Paint a picture: VR provides visitors with an insightful and enjoyable experience

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