The VR design replicates a set of social interactions and experiences of a digital art museum, including a lobby (the landing page) and an immersive theme room. In the planning stage, our team created personas (figures 2-3) of potential primary users to define their needs, goals, and frustrations. We were oriented to create a private, convenient, and informative museum experience, where users can learn about the culture, history, and meaning behind each artwork in one dynamic and immersive virtual environment. We then proceeded to create the information architecture (figure 4) and scenarios (figure 5), build the platform, and test our prototype. In general, we distributed the work by aligning our skills with the nature of the tasks. Since I was the team member with the strongest HTML and JavaScript coding skills, my core task was to build the Digital Museum using A-Frame and Glitch.

 

In the Immersion Room, I included three artworks that users can interact with. Each has its own art description, 360-degree panoramic background, and accompanying music to enable users to feel more connected to the culture and history of the country where the artwork is from. With my musical and artistic knowledge, I selected artworks and musical pieces that were rich in meaning and emotionally powerful. Not only does the integration of impactful VR panoramas, artworks, and music help take full control of the user’s senses (sight and hearing, particularly) to build a captivating and completely immersive experience, but also, these design elements evoke different social, emotional, and/or spiritual responses from users as the users navigate among the French, Canadian Indigenous, and Japanese artworks. Meanwhile, on the landing page, I leveraged background audio to establish a museum ambience and I included hanging paintings to give users a preview of the artworks to come.

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Some design challenges that I experienced first pertained to a browser limitation, where playing sound on iOS requires a physical user interaction. I dealt with this obstacle by making each artwork a button that would start the aligned ambient music when the user clicks on it. Secondly, our team initially planned to incorporate many interactive features to enhance the user experience (figure 4), such as by adding a menu for adjusting platform settings, as well as the functions to comment and "like" the artworks (figure 5). However, due to my limited coding capabilities using the syntax in A-Frame, I incorporated a panorama, accompanying music, and art description in place for each artwork. Yet, this revised option encompasses more value associated with the portrayed domain of a VR digital art museum. It makes the experience more visually and aurally compelling, as the artworks, sceneries, and music synergistically highlight and differentiate the three cultures. In the future, I aspire to build additional immersive rooms that would offer more varieties of user interactions, such as where users can watch videos and play with imitations of historical artifacts.