In order to attract a broader audience and encourage the user group to buy artworks after visiting a gallery, this project aims to create a new gallery concept combining the physical and the virtual dimension. The main objective of this master thesis is to use virtual reality to enhance the current art experience and encourage their purchases, designing intuitive interactions between the viewer and the virtual art gallery. The project started with researching from three aspects, including human, technology and business, to explore the current situation of the galleries and customers, as well as the possible design opportunities. The result showed there were mainly two reasons why more galleries closed because of few customers in recent years. On the one hand, current galleries often couldn’t attract customers to view around for a long time. On the other hand, novice customers don’t have an easy and friendly way to purchase artworks. Therefore, it requires the design to find a proper way to help the small art businesses adopt a more modern way of selling artworks, and attract younger customers. The desired user experience focusing on three key elements (approachable, emotions, purchase) is determined after analyzing.
During the conceptualization, three concepts focusing on three key elements were developed by conducting co-creation sessions. User evaluation was conducted using paper prototyping to test certain features and people’s likelihood of use. Six key elements that should be included in the final concept was concluded from the evaluation. By conducting the prototyping process, four steps of building a virtual gallery were found, and the process is able to be used as a guideline for researchers or designers who want to develop a virtual gallery. In order to find a relatively better interaction for certain functions, two gallery concepts were created to compare the interactions. In the last evaluation phase, the design concepts were tested with potential users to get critical feedback and suggestion. The recommendations and limitations were discussions as well in the end.