At the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a few meters from the exhibition event on the last months of Vincent Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, visitors can participate in a complementary experience: an immersive adventure devoted to the painter’s palette.
What progress compared to 2018, and the pioneering experience in VR, in parallel with the Monet exhibition! At the time, the three headsets were connected, by a cable, to a PC hidden under each seat. We held controllers and often ended up feeling dizzy, or even with a real heartache.
Five years later, Van Gogh’s palette take advantage of the very latest HTC Vive headset, the The XR Elite is wireless – that changes everything – significantly lighter, better balanced, with a resolution close to 4K. No need for headphones or earphones: sound is projected into the ears from the edges of the headphones.
The opportunity to discover Vincent Van Gogh’s palette in a different way, but also to test the latest advances in the field of virtual reality.
Virtual fingers covered in multi-colored paint
A headset that also detects hand movement, and therefore no more need for controllers! No more anxiety about not knowing which button to press! Concretely, as soon as you put your hands in front of you, they appear in their virtual form, inside the helmet. And when, for example, we need to open a door or grab an object, experience tells us, by covering our virtual fingers with multicolored paints.
So we sit in a room, with three rows of four swivel stools: and believe me, you will turn around to enjoy the 360° environment. 12 VR headsets, in total, for this 10-minute journey, in a very special environment.
Indeed, time has frozen the last grams of gouache deposited by Vincent Van Gogh, notably while painting the portrait of Marguerite Gachet. This last palette visible – under glass – in the main exhibition, serves as a landscape for the VR experience. A team specialized in photogrammetry took thousands of photos, in very high resolution, to restore the colors of course, but also the shine, the volumes, the relief.
Pushing paint bubbles with your hands
As you zoom in on the palette, the paint bumps become hills; furrows, valleys. You are at the center of what was Van Gogh’s last working tool. You can stand up, and even take a step or two. This is where five of the master’s paintings will appear successively, after playing with suspended paint bubbles, which are mixed by pushing them, virtually, against each other.
A word of advice: it’s better to book for this “Van Gogh palette” (€6) in virtual reality. Capacity is slightly less than 400 people per day – 400 VR slots of 20 minutes, including installation time – for 5,000 visitors expected daily, in the main exhibition.