Mighty Verse: The Journey of Begines XR

Upon entering the Project Gallery1, visitors encounter numerous sculptures that make up the complex installation titled Luncheon on the Grass by Nayoungim & Gregory Maass. Visitors can freely combine, reconfigure, and transform virtual objects that are augmented on the artworks on the screens of tablet computers. In 1972, Ivan Sutherland recreated a car as a virtual object by drawing points and lines by hand. Since then, the process of recognizing objects and spaces and representing them in virtual reality has left human eyes and hands, continuously evolving through spatial computing technology. Recently, it became possible, incorporate an exhibition space as a whole into the world of extended reality. In the world of extended reality, virtual objects created by a single visitors are simultaneously seen by other visitors as well. Individual interactions are synchronized to create a virtual landscape. Now, the screen that visitors experience evolves from a screen that loads virtual objects to a common interface that connects and recreates the real and the virtual within the world of extended reality.

The extended reality of the future is not limited to the experiential technology for the moment of appreciating artworks in museums. Rather, it operates as a grand universe that closely connects information from real and virtual world with visitors’ experience. Through Mighty Verse, visitors can create virtual objects on the screens of tablet computers. The objects are then displayed in an archive accessible through VR devices. Those who access the website also intervene in the virtual space yet in another way. The augmented virtual space in the exhibition space (Mighty Verse AR), the virtual space within virtual reality (Mighty Verse VR), and a virtual space online (Mighty Verse web) show different forms and appearances. However, all of them exchange information and data on the extended reality platform of the exhibition Your Holiday. Therefore, the process of participating in the exhibition is one that transforms the informational values of objects and spaces online. By accumulating all information in the same database, it becomes possible to connect and share experiences.

In the world of extended reality, a museum is not a repository of real or virtual artworks. Rather, it is similar to a platform through which flows a lot of data left by the experiences of visitors. Visitors can naturally participate in the extended reality platform through a variety of equipment such as mobile devices, tablet computers, HMDs, wearable devices, and smart glasses. These comprise an unseen yet connected museum, as the visitors to this museum always access all of its space from the storage to exhibition spaces and learning spaces at anytime, anywhere. The information requested and provided by the visitors, the data they generate, and all the processes they participate in can remain in the form of a log of an extended reality platform. If the records of the visitors’ creation, collection, and appreciation are synchronized beyond physical limitations, the meaning of ‘visiting a museum to see an exhibition’ will change quite a bit. Finding an orientation in the maze of possibilities that extended reality opens up depends not on the process of applying technology, but on the process of broadening the relationship between visitors and artworks. Mighty Verse is just one of many ‘unseen museums.’ As such, it leaves a number of questions that require continued discussions on the matter.