Foto: Städel Museum

VR Experience  •  2016 Städel Museum
Time Travel VR

For the virtual exhibition project "Time travel - The Städel Museum in the 19th Century" a research team created highly detailed reconstructions of the famous, Frankfurt based museum's historical collection presentations.

At NMY I was the UX designer of a project team that developed an interactive VR tour through the museum of the year 1878.

Client: Städel Museum / SAMSUNG
With: NMY Mixed-Reality Communication GmbH
My role: Interaction Concept, UX/UI Design, UI & Animations in Unity

About the project

Standing in front of today's Städel after starting the VR experience, users travel back in time to enter the museum in its opening year of 1878. There they have the possibility to explore over 600 paintings on two floors. Users can freely move through the 15 fully reconstructed exhibition rooms on their own or choose between two audio-guided tours. Each painting can be examined in detail, conveniently sliding right in front of the user, on the click of a button. A low-key UI and atmospheric sound deepen the immersion while providing helpful tools to navigate through the experience.

Insight  •  Challenges & Learnings Overcoming technical limitations to create an immersive experience.

The VR experience funded by SAMSUNG was built for mobile Gear VR headsets, which required consideration of some technical limitations compared to desktop VR experiences. The hardware did not allow for positional tracking and the only means for interaction input were the user's head rotation and a touchpad on the headset. Thus a gaze-cursor based interaction model was used and all content was highly optimized to reduce file size and performance intensity.

Despite the absence of positional tracking, a goal was to achieve an immersive feeling of really strolling through the museum while still avoiding motion sickness. Therefore a lot of testing was done to find the least curvy paths for the guided tours and to optimize walking speeds and acceleration.

In addition to the detailed reconstruction of the architecture and paintings, ambient sound and sound effects, e.g. different footstep sounds for various floor materials, help users feel more grounded in the world. A low-key UI provides additional information to paintings and helps users navigate through the museum while not distracting from the immersive environment.

While waiting for the application to load a new scene in the background, users can read through a brief tutorial.

Users can see how the environment around them changed over time, when time-traveling back to 1878 before entering the museum.

Audio content about paintings or the architecture can be accessed through panels located in the museum's rooms.

Paintings can be selected by tapping the headsets touchpad to reveal a label with additional metadata. It was quite tricky to find a way to scale and position paintings of any given size so they can be comfortably viewed in detail mode.

To provide better orientation, when entering a room, a label with the corresponding name will appear on the ground.

A menu, that is always accessible to users via a button under their feet, contains an overview map to instantly jump to any available room, and settings such as the walking speed.

The Städel Time Travel VR experience can be downloaded via the Oculus Store. There is also a desktop version for PC which you can download on the Städel Time Travel project page.

Download on Oculus Store Download Desktop Version

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