Imagine being able to whip out your smartphone and use it to discover various new and old works of art from your favorite artists in full size, all from the comfort of your house. Or maybe visiting a recent exhibit from your favorite art museum, while taking a leisurely stroll through a park.
Well this is now a reality, all thanks to new advances in the augmented reality space. Today, artists, curators, and auctioneers have increased their digital footprint in order to remain connected with their changing audiences, a connection that is particularly important with all the social distancing going on in the world.
Now is a fairly perfect time to introduce a unique augmented reality experience that brings famous artworks right into people’s living rooms. It provides an immersive museum experience for those locked down, all without the crowds of tourists and long lens cameras obstructing your view of the art.
This new piece of tech was developed by Cuseum. They’ve also published some pretty groundbreaking research on how the brain perceives art. They spent a lot of time looking in to how we perceive art in immersive technologies and digital forms. They went even further comparing it to how we perceived the original tangible art piece to begin with. The results are surprising.
Using Augmented Reality to View Art
Ciecko, who is an art enthusiast, is immensely passionate about art and culture. Before inventing up Cuseum, he worked with a lot of cultural institutions and museums. While working there, he quickly learned that they used inadequate and outdated technology.
Even though they actively tried to improve the experience and its accessibility for visitors, they could never achieve any real success because of the limitations in their existing tools. This inspired him to create Cuseum to address these issues.
Their most recent innovation is Museum from Home. They invested a lot of time and effort to create a digital solution to navigate the closure of museums. By using the feature of augmented reality, you can now have popular artworks and paintings directly on the walls of your house.
The available artworks are public domain works, mostly from the collections of The Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Rijksmuseum, and other museums that permit Open Access. This includes famous artworks such as Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.
People that prefer contemporary works of art can also look at them by using Cuseum-powered partner apps. This AR feature allows you to admire art pieces that you would only be able to look at in a museum.
How does the Brain Perceive Art?
According to the breakthrough research by Cuseum on how the brain perceives art, the aesthetic experience is not lost through digital representation. This means that the human brain does not differentiate between artworks in digital forms and their physical, tangible original copies.
Importance of this Research
These findings will affect the future Cuseum apps because they were originally focused on increasing on-site experiences for museum visitors. But that changed when art and cultural institutions closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the future, they’ll also focus on addressing the viewing of artwork at home. With travel restrictions on museums, they are excited to provide at-home solutions for everyone. This AR app doesn’t only help museums survive in the digital age; it also helps them flourish as a vital and transformative part of society.
The developers of this AR app are excited to be the leading provider of digital and immersive solutions to museums and cultural organizations. They’re looking forward to providing them with better and more inclusive access to a wider audience.
The Future of Augmented Reality in Art
Augmented reality is capable of giving us control of the visual sense of an individual. This makes it possible to have a better spectrum of art and digital art forms.
Even though traditional art has been restricted to the physical workspace in the real world, people in some parts of the real world can now be manipulated in real-time with new digital content. The surroundings of an individual could be modified to make everything look like a mirrored surface.
In the world of art, this will probably mean that 3D modeling, digital content, and texture mapping will become important skills for artists. Also, new forms of creation, like molding 3D objects in physical spaces, drawing in thin air, and collaborative real-time authoring will be available.
This will create new core forms of art, and likely make it possible for new modes of visual communication for those that use the technology.