The Kremer Collection VR Museum

VR Review ★★☆☆☆‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎
PCVR Quest Link Free Art Museums Travel Comfortable Roomscale

The image shows a modern interior space with a curved, segmented ceiling and a multi-tiered balcony or viewing platform. The design features reflective surfaces and geometric patterns. In the foreground, there’s a logo that reads “The Kremer Collection.”

The Kremer Collection comprises around eighty works of 17th century Dutch and Flemish old masters. This private collection is often loaned to museums and galleries around the world, but scans of the full collection are also available on their website and in their virtual reality museum.

The Virtual Reality gallery opens up into a large circular atrium with multiple spokes leading towards the paintings that are displayed on the room's perimeter. The paintings float off the wall, supposedly so you can inspect the backing "to explore the work's unique stamps of provenance" though every backing we looked at was a generic image. Interpretive text and narration in English is available for all of the paintings we inspected. Moving around the gallery is achieved with teleportation locomotion (pointing to where you want to stand) and you can move around in your space to take a closer look at the paintings.

The image shows a large, ornate framed painting displayed on a wall in a dimly lit gallery. The painting depicts several figures, with one prominently dressed in historical clothing.

The image shows a large, ornate framed painting displayed on a wall in a dimly lit gallery. The painting depicts several figures, with one prominently dressed in historical clothing.

A wall of floating Dutch old masters.

At first glance the paintings appear rendered in significant detail, but it doesn't take long to realize that much of the detail is achieved with a generic and somewhat reflective texture applied in front of the scanned image. We investigated further, comparing a VR gallery image of a painting against another version on the Kremer Collection website. The website version contains more detail and more dynamic range, making individual brushstrokes apparent in ways that are not visible on the smoothed VR version.

We question the value of a VR gallery where the viewing experience is diminished compared with simple flat-screen computer image, and loading up a web page on demand is much easier than downloading a 10GB art gallery in virtual reality. This failing may be more of a limitation in available technology than the intent of the authors of the program, but it may be a long while before computers are able to render the intricate three dimensional detailed brushstrokes of an Old Master.

The image shows two side-by-side scenes of a person’s hands playing a violin. Below the hands, on a green surface, there is a glass of red liquid and crumpled sheets of paper.