Realistic Dimension

This week I have been attempting to make our Unity recreation of the gallery space more realistic. If deployed, this part of the app would create a more augmented gallery experience, combining the basic requirement of navigation with the more abstract exploration of the concepts and information about the artworks simultaneously

To do this, I have been working to try get the artworks and gallery to a more a more realistic scale. I mocked up the artworks to scale in Illustrator and was surprised at how they actually varied.

As we hadn't been given a scale or any measurements with the floor plan of the gallery which we'd used to build up the 3D model of the space, I had to judge by eye what looked right, using the animated tour of the gallery as a guide. However, once the artworks too had been made to relative scale, some of them seemed ridiculously small.

I debated this situation for a while as having studied art, I know that the size of an artworks impacts the meaning of the artwork itself. For example, studying abstract expressionist paintings in high school, working from small scale reproductions in books and online, didn't compare to seeing them in real life on such a scale where it completely encompasses one's field of view. The size of the artwork is interellated with the medium and meaning which is why I was stressing getting this to an accurate depiction within the Unity recreation.

So for the purposes of this application, it makes more sense to have the artworks at a size where they are visible, especially when taken on the context of the iPhone as platform where you have a much smaller screen size than, say, a computer. Taking usability into respect, the artworks act also as clickable 'buttons', hence they need to be a reasonable size for the human finger to touch without difficulty (the ideal mimimum button size for the human finger is 44x44 pixels). In terms of visual aesthetic, it is important the viewer can actually have a good view of the artworks within the space so they can see what links are being made without having to fiddle too much with the navigation to get in 'closer' to the work.

As the primary purpose of the app is to be used in the gallery itself, the user would have the artworks in front of them anyway and would be able to make the visual connection. So at this point, usability is more important. The scale of the gallery itself is a huge improvement as the initial mock up had seemingly small rooms, high walls, narrow doorways and no ceiling.

(Click to enlarge)

I then worked to try get the righting light. In the animated tour, the gallery looks more cream sort of light and I tried to recreate this. The difficult part is to try get not only the tone right but also the lighting itself. Currently it looks quite dim but is an improvement as it looks a bit less like a 'cold' 3D render.

This part of the project is one which will not likely be integrated as part of the final app itself but rather a standalone component which supports the project as a whole. It is important to deploy it start testing it on the iPhone itself so we can start getting user feedback. It makes sense to us as we have been working with it so closely but it has been a concept difficult to explain to others but we are hoping that if we create it right, it will make sense to the user upon being presented with it.

The phase of creation needs to start drawing to a close in order to finish to test and document this project for our final presentation and end of year exhibition. Feedback we can get now will inform our reflections and give us a greater understanding of knowledge to discuss in our final critique.