System: HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green
Genre: Virtual Tour
Input: Tracked Motion Controllers
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
VR Shop Score 1/100: 45
Description: This virtual museum includes three unique pieces for users to engage with, leading to a broader, interactive experience of the original art pieces. Users are able to move freely around the museum’s east wing from inside their headsets, and view a dozen paintings, four works of sculpture, and one video art installation in high fidelity. Upon approaching Adams Memorial, users are transported out of the museum and into a 3D volumetric recreation in Rock Creek Park Cemetery, can experience a 360-degree, 6K video of an actual aurora borealis, and are greeted by a volumetric hologram of the artist Alex Prager explaining the inspiration for the 2013 film, Face in the Crowd.
Review: While it is hard to moan about anything free ‘Smithsonian American Art Museum “Beyond The Walls”‘ makes me do just that. It could have been the perfect chance for them to do a whole virtual tour of the World famous Art Museum, but instead, you get just three interactive works of art with very little educational content linked to them. Not even the 360 video here saves the day due to its low quality. If you really love your art I suppose it is still worth a look, but I feel they could have done so much more with this and they hardly put in any effort at all.
