Virtual Reality in the Art Museum
Hao Zhou · 2019
With unique affordances of immersion and interaction, virtual reality (VR) technologies have been increasingly utilised in the art museum, offering new opportunities to update and enrich the museum practice whilst bringing issues and concerns in the meantime. The complexity of the situation is demonstrated widely in debates in existing literature, posing urgent needs for a systematic, theoretical approach to shed light on the issues involved and inform art museum professionals in their decision-making process. Based on a review of debates and investigations in related fields, this paper proposes the notion of presence as an appropriate theoretical lens of inspection that signifies critical salience in both fields of VR and art museums. It further argues that current studies on presence have not demonstrated a holistic approach to address this intersectional context, hence an integrated understanding of presence is to be developed. In doing so, this paper poses a taxonomy of presence in four dimensions as an initial attempt to bridge current findings, addressing aspects of human, content, interaction and socialising respectively in the context of art museums using VR.