Heimo Zobernig’s ‘Spatial approach to Piet Mondrian’
Moving on from the proof of concept delivered pilot work demonstrated at VSS and ECVP in 2018’, we developed a revised virtual model that accounts for some minor issues of Mondrian’s ‘Farbentwurf’, and designed a controlled experiment to collect a substantial data set. For the 2019 exhibition ‘Zukunftsräume’ at the Albertinum in Dresden, the Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig created a full-scale, free-standing physical model that corresponds to the VR space for one day right next to each other. This offered a unique opportunity to compare eye movements between virtual and real reconstructions of the Mondrian’s salon in individual participants.
Experimental setup in the Museum Albertinum: a physical reconstruction of Mondrian’s salon (left) is juxtaposed with a VR play area (right: outlined by the dotted line on the ground) in which participants can explore the virtual salon.
This exhibition provided an opportunity to use a mobile eye tracker (Tobii Glasses 2) and the HTC Vive headset which incorporates an eye-tracker system (Tobii Pro VR Integration) in parallel, to collect gaze data from a set of 31 volunteers who visited the museum, and compare their explorative eye movements in the real and virtual Mondrian room. The overall pattern of eye movements can be illustrated by heat maps that show the probability to fixate particular regions of the two environments in colour code.
Heat maps showing the probability to fixate particular regions of the two environments in pseudo-colour code (red for fixation peaks) for the real (left) and virtual (right) Mondrian room.
This data set is the basis for quantitative analysis of specific aspects of gaze patterns and questionnaire response
How much time do participants spend overall to look at the room ?
Cumulative fixation duration for the real (black) and virtual space (grey), shown as box-and-whisker plot with outliers that indicate central tendency and dispersion. Participants made fewer fixations in the real than in the virtual space, which can be explained by less time spent in the real than in the virtual space.
How do participants allocate their gaze in the room ?
Fixation duration normalised to area, in real (left) and virtual space (right) for room surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling: red), furniture (bed, cupboard, bookcase: yellow) and outside regions (windows, doors: blue), shown as box-and-whisker plot. Participants are attracted most strongly by three pieces of furniture in the real and virtual space, and are more interested in the outside virtual as compared to the room surfaces in the virtual space but not in the real space.
How do participants respond to the colours of Mondrian’s design ?
Fixation duration on rectangles covering the room surfaces with different colours (white, grey, black, red, blue, yellow), normalised to area, in real (left) and virtual space (right), shown as box-and-whisker plot. In both spaces, participants are attracted most strongly to high-intensity rectangles (black and Mondrian’s characteristic primary colours), whilst low-intensity rectangles (white and grey) are visited much less.
Who are our participants ?
Some relevant demographic data characterise the 31 participants taking part in or experiment. Their age (bar chart on the left) ranges between 20 and 79 years, with an average of 49 years, reflecting a typical spread for visitors of art museums. The level of educational achievement of our participants is remarkable: 56% have a higher university degree or PhD – this could be related to the nature of the exhibition as well as the interest to take part in the experiment.
What do our participants think about their experience ?
In exit questionnaires we asked participants about their subjective experience in the experiment, by responding to statements on a 5 point scale between agreement and disagreement. There was a strong majority who enjoyed the experiment and found it entertaining. Judgements whether the virtual space felt like the real space were balanced, and there was no clear preference for real or virtual space. Importantly, there was a very strong view that conventional museums will not lose their significance, whilst there was a balanced view that arts should be generally made available in digital media.
