Paint Walker offers the virtual experience of walking across a painting. Picture by Daniel Figueroa
Traveling across a virtual Van Gogh painting of sunflowers and exploring a exhibit in the world of Minecraft were some of the digital experiences provided by the Met Digital Open House on May 13.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art( the Met) presents the Met Digital Open House. The Met Digital is a show case of initiatives, projects and experiments from The MediaLab creative development group in the Digital Media Department. Sree Sreenivasan is the Met Chief Digital Officer who is in charge of shaping the museum’s social, mobile and online future. Sreenivasan states this annual event is version 1.0 and would like people to provide feedback about the MediaLab pilot projects. MediaLab pilot projects such as Paint Walker and Metcraft: Anitiquity Adventure are ways to use digital technologies to get more of the Met’s collections into the individual eyes. Bringing physical collections into digital games is the Met’s goal to get more of the people who can not visit the Met to feel like they had an experience in the Met.
A reproduction of one of Vincent van Gogh’s bright colored sunflower painting developed for Paint Walker. Photo provided by Daniel Figueroa.
Paint Walker is a virtual reality game where you walk across the “virtual” surface of an oil painting.
Sam Von Ehren, one of the creators of the game talks about creating an immersion experience for museum-goers.
Ehren spoke about the design of recreating an oil painting into a game. ” Using 3d dimensional scanner is load in paintings into a virtual world to walk around on the painting by using a controller and a VR headset.” says Ehren.
MetCraft: Antiquity Adventure is where museum- goers explore recreations of Met exhibits within a Minecraft map. Photo by Daniel Figueroa.
MetCraft: Antiquity Adventure
Jason Veloz, a member of the team states MetCraft is, “a Educational single player experience in a recreated art museum.”
Museum-goers could sight-see the places and objects, and perform events that described from information specified during a tour of the authentic areas in the museum.
These experiences symbolize numerous of the current digital initiatives established by the Met MediaLab to discover the joining of technology and culture. To find new ways for visitors of all ages to appreciate these works both physical and digital for the future of Met Digital.