AR & VR metaverse design, development, publishing and consulting.

AG VR Retrospective

Alex Gardner is a contemporary artist, successful in selling his paintings internationally with numerous pieces on display at key museums. In February of 2021, Alex contacted Axeliant to build something completely new. Alex had a vision to bring his art into an immersive experience that enveloped viewers in the scenes he typically paints.

Alex has a signature art style that is immediately recognizable in much of his work. Replicating his sense of color, space and detail into a digital medium would be a challenge. Furthermore, Alex was accustomed to full control from paint brush to canvas. There would now be other creatives and technologists between Alex’s vision and the resulting piece. The margin for error was small and it was an opportunity that we were happy to accept.

The first thing we did was meet with Alex to talk and understand everything he already had in mind. We had an initial sense of the project from our brief discussion and knew that there would be numerous aspects to consider. It was important to narrow and prioritize the conversation. We started with what was most important. What did Alex want his viewers to see, hear and feel?

Alex had an immediate and strong sense of the visual experience he wanted for his viewers. He would be using one of his paintings as inspiration for the scene that was to unfold. Rather than viewing the painting on a 2D canvas, the viewer would be placed within the painting itself. We loved that idea! Not only would the viewer feel as if they were inside the painting – they would also see a story unfold. This would not be a static experience but rather an extension of the story portrayed by the painting. The experience would put viewers into the characters of the painting and delve deeper into the perspective of those characters.

We were ecstatic! This initial vision from Alex was an incredible starting point. Virtual Reality (VR) became the front runner among platforms that we could choose to build on. This would allow for complete visual and auditory immersion in the scene that we would create. From there, we worked with Alex to create storyboards and colorways. The storyboards allowed us to develop a sense of the motion and timing that would create the story. The color was an important detail. Alex’s use of color, gradients and shading is exceptional – it’s also unmistakably Alex. The color transitions had to be just right.

When the story and timing was established we opened the conversation to audio. This was in some ways new for Alex. His paintings are not typically accompanied by audio. The audio chosen for this experience would be used to add layers onto the story but it needed to do so in alignment with the visual style that is well established in Alex’s paintings. We collaborated with Alex to conceptualize, record and mix the audio that would ultimately tie the entire experience together.

Once the experience itself was well defined, we moved onto the next set of concerns – how would the experience be distributed and accessed. Alex wanted his piece to work well in a controlled environment like a museum or gallery but also something that could be broadly accessible. We decided that a WebXR based project would give Alex the reach he desired. Web based VR projects are accessible on any browser-enabled head mounted display (HMD). The most popular HMD today is Quest 2 by Meta (formerly Oculus). Therefore, we used Quest 2 as the primary development platform for Alex’s project.

The use of hands in this project contributed particularly well to the sense of existing within the piece. We used controller tracking as a proxy for hand positions. From there we were able to use the HMD & controller positions to infer arms and elbows which then casted shadows of yourself onto the virtual environment. Altogether making no mistake that this was not a static experience but rather something you were participating in and shaping in real-time.

3D Studio Max and Unity formed the primary toolchain for this project. This enabled rich control of shape, color and animation that was needed to meet Alex’s visual style – and could also be published for playback in a WebXR environment.

A monetization plan is something that Axeliant also worked on with Alex to define. Alex’s paintings sell for quite a lot, by anyone’s measure. Meanwhile, digital art is not something that has a long track record of being successfully monetized. Much less so for Virtual Reality. We knew that a tokenized asset (NFT) would work quite well for the piece that Axeliant built for Alex. Ultimately, this project served as an exploration for Alex into a new medium. It was decided to hold this piece from release, for the time being while these learnings are rolled into future projects.

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