2020 Is the Year of Hybrid VR Paintings

Book excerpt: Hybrid VR Paintings are virtual reality paintings by Dave Alber. Have you ever been in an art gallery and become so fascinated by a colorful painting that you wondered what it would be like to actually enter into that painting? With Hybrid VR Paintings and the VR Paintings app, you can enter colorful and thick impasto oil paintings and experience them as fully immersive 360° virtual reality experiences. In your new life, living within these colorful oil paintings unbounded by edges, you can turn left and right; zoom in and out; climb out of the painting and return to the gallery; and then view the painting again as a flat image; read information about the painting and the exhibition; and explore other VR rooms and VR exhibitions in the VR gallery.The only gallery where you can do this is The Floating Gallery™, a VR art gallery without floor or ceiling. This VR gallery itself is in fact an oil painting. It is a fully immersive 360° oil painted gallery, within which you can explore room after room of fine art collections.All of the framed art on the walls of these rooms may be entered as Hybrid VR Paintings™. Each painting in The Floating Gallery is a physical painting that actually exists in the real world, and which, within the virtual world of the VR Paintings app, becomes a fully immersive VR reality. Interactive buttons allow you to move from gallery to gallery; to enter the paintings as 360° environments; to view the flat art; and to get more information about the art. The VR Paintings app is best experienced with Google Cardboard , Oculus Go, or other VR headsets. However, The Floating Gallery also works with an unassisted iPhone or iPad. (In other words, you may use it without VR goggles.) Features: •Explore The Floating Gallery™ • Enter Hybrid VR Paintings™ • Enjoy paintings and galleries as fully interactive 360° VR environments • View paintings as flat images • Retrieve information about paintings and exhibits • Connect with online resources such as downloadable PDFs. Artist and VR developer, Dave Alber says, “VR Paintings connects the long continuity of the oil painting tradition with the immediacy of 21st century technology. Not everyone sees the value of art, but friends of the art tradition will certainly want to explore this marriage of art and VR technology.”