Article by Desirèe Maida on Artribune.
Conceived and launched by Mucciaccia Gallery, the exhibition was developed by the milanese startup Wide VR. We sought an explanation of how a 3D cloud streaming exhibition operates.
The world is increasingly turning to digital technologies to promote exhibitions, engage online audiences, and, importantly, drive sales. The ongoing health crisis has accelerated the "virtualization" process of galleries, which had already been exploring platforms and digital spaces for some time. Examples include David Zwirner, Larry Gagosian, and Oliver Miro. Particularly, we've discussed Massimo De Carlo, who inaugurated a new outpost of his gallery in a "virtual space" developed by Wide VR, a startup specializing in real-time content for art, founded by architect Edoardo Graziadei and gallerist Andrea Zardin. Discussing digital technologies applied to art, on July 28th, the Mucciaccia Gallery – established in 2006 by Massimiliano Mucciaccia with locations in Rome, Cortina, London, New York, and Singapore – conceived and launched an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1929) in 3D cloud streaming, developed by Wide VR.
A pioneer, the 3D cloud streaming exhibition dedicated to the famous Japanese artist showcases artworks from the 1950 to 2007, alongside three large sculptures exhibited in 2004 at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo during the Kusamatrix exhibition, visited by over a million people. In this project cloud streaming is applied for the first time to a virtual exhibition harnessing the computational power of remote data centers and enabling viewers to access high-quality real-time 3D content on any device.
What exactly does this mean, and how does it differ from a virtual reality exhibition? "A navigable 3D virtual exhibition on the web has limitations because the application hosting the exhibition must be supported by a website, which in the standard WebGL format is limited to a few tens of megabytes," Edoardo Graziadei explained to Artribune.
"Cloud streaming overcomes this challenge by running a powerful PC app, made in HDRP, on a supercomputer, perhaps located in the USA. The app, weighing several gigabytes in this case, is streamed (like Netflix) to any device worldwide. This ensures a vastly superior quality and marks the beginning of a new era in virtual exhibitions." The exhibition will be accessible until August 31st on the Mucciaccia Gallery website at this link.
