7-How VR can Influence the World of Art

VR- art and emotions

• The core mechanism by which artists elicit feelings in a viewer.

  • Goal: Artists intentionally design art to manipulate and shift the viewer's emotional state (e.g., creating happiness or sadness).

  • Role of Immersion: Deeper immersion leads directly to a stronger emotional response.

  • Traditional Methods: Artists build immersion using colour, storytelling, and authenticity.

Traditional Art Forms & Sensory Processing (Slide 5)

• Different artistic styles—such as cubism, sculptures, and impressionism—that share a common sensory limitation in traditional viewing settings.

  • Sensory Input: Traditional art relies almost exclusively on vision (sight) to be experienced.

  • Cognitive Limitation: Because viewers usually observe these pieces passively from a distance (often behind glass or ropes), other senses like touch, sound, and spatial movement are completely left out, setting up how VR can expand sensory immersion.

Problem with Only Using Vision

• The sensory barrier in traditional art galleries where experiences rely almost entirely on sight to evoke emotion.

  • Physical Restrictions: Galleries strictly forbid physical contact (e.g., "Please Don't Touch" rules) to prevent skin oils from damaging paintings and sculptures.

  • Missed Opportunity: Blocking touch and other sensory inputs restricts deeper multi-sensory immersion, limiting how powerfully the brain processes and connects with the artwork.

Immersion Through Non-Visual Senses (Slide 7)

• The concept that all five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) can trigger deep emotional immersion and alter perception.

  • Sound: Music and lyrics directly evoke strong emotional reactions.

  • Touch: Physical comfort (like a warm bed) can distort our cognitive perception of time.

  • Smell & Taste: Specific flavors or scents instantly trigger vivid autobiographical memories.

  • Modern Shift: While historical art relied almost exclusively on vision, modern technology and VR are now expanding art to engage these other senses

spence 2020

Investigated olfactory (smell) he found smell influences emotional responses and perceptions on art,

But additional sensory stimulation doesn’t always improve experience because it can be overwhelming and take attention from art

Problem 1 with art in real world

access ability issue, so if you wanna know poeple lots of art gallery has to be huge which is very expensive

problem 2

Museums are limited by the number of pieces of art that they can display due to lack of

space

E.g Vangoch nuseum

entry is 25-40 pound cost higher as a result from the problem - problematic not a lot of people willing to pay there for limits audience

Solution= VR

stimulated 3D enviroment

How does VR help

Space isn’t a problem in a stimulated world, all information stored on computer so can create huge buildings with no additional cost

Benefit to artist

Artist increased potential to what they can create

advantage 1- accessibility

Can go anywhere be physically there without having to make the extra dstance- save money

Advantage 2- laws os physics

Laws of physics dont exist in VR- we can defy gravity in a stimulation, can divert gravity, paint in mid air== increases potential and increases variety and less of a limit on artists

Advantage 3- shared virtual spaces

If u were passionate about art can share it online as normally average person who isn’t a professional artist can’t just go to a museum.

Can access art for free/show your art online

Art reaaserch involving VR

Aesthetic preferences considered

Subjective

Asking people their opinions on different art

Problem with subjective

People may not give an accurate answer and may respond differently— subjective bias from influence of other facts e.g ugly baiting worth 10 mil

Object measure

Eye tracking

Portable eye tracking

Allows participants to react in a natural way, notice when someones gaze it drawn to one picture more than others.

Pelowski et al 2018

used a portable eye tracking device in

their research to measure both what aspects of the art

participants were looking at but also how long you were

looking at each area for

This information can then be translated into a heat map such

as the one to the right

This shows the advantages of using eye tracking as not only

can the researchers see participants interest in artwork based

on the duration of their focus, but can also see which

particular parts of the art they show interest in

Eye tracking in VR- portable eye tracker

Advantage portable eye tracker in a museum to determine what thye’re looking at

however

participant recruitment will still have the

problem of participants needing to be relatively local in

order to access the museum

but with VR

participants don’t need to be local, they can

access the simulation from anywhere in the world

• Since some higher end VR headsets have eye tracking

built in, could researchers use a combination of eye

tracking and VR for research such as this instead?

Limitations of VR

Expensive to buy, although it lasts forever and gives endless possibilities,

One headset between a lot isn’t enough and buying more than one will be huge as the cheap considered is 300 pound

Combination of Reality and VR

AR- Augmented reality (like Pokemon go)

AR art

allows exhibits to be interav=crive so can add extra layers onto already existing work,

Cheaper and everyone always carries their phones around, for the museum its therefore cheap.

Using AR around galleries

Cheaper for museum than buying lots of Vr headset

AR can add additional context, historical information or supplementary media (e.g., a video about the artist, etc) when going around gallerie

Pros of AR over VR

Access is affordable, everyone has a phone or can access a cheap tablet, VR headset is spenny

Can access it quickly only need to scan QR

Cons of AR over VR

Immersion- uses phone that is 2D display similar to a computer, VR is much more immersive compared

Accessibility- AR needs to have certain objects to scan to produce the images so the user will need to go to the museum but VR doesn’t need this as all the art is already on the simulation

Verhulst et al 2021 Supprtots VR

who found VR produced immersion and enjoyment over AR

What is AI

generated to think lke humans but much quicker and much more efficient and accurate

Generating themed images is easy, but art isn’t as easy why?

Lkc of emotion

As with any art, the artist needs to have an idea that is capable of manipulating the emotions of

their audience

• Do you think an AI would be able to portray art that depicts heartbreak that feels genuine?

• So whilst AI is able to drastically reduce the length of time it takes to create this art, the artist is

still responsible for generating the key specific details in the first place

problem with ai regarding Ownerships

f the artwork sold for £2 million, who would get the money?

Ai problem making art with plagiarism

– In the art world, what do you think happens if someone clearly directly copies someone

else's art? They would be punished in some way

But can you punish an AI?

Take academia for instance. The journal “Nature” is not taking accepting any papers that

have an AI as the author