HANEKE DESIGN CREATES VIRTUAL ART GALLERY TO SHOWCASE TAMPA'S BERKELEY PREPARATORY STUDENTS' WORK

Haneke Design partners with Berkeley Preparatory School to create a virtual gallery to showcase artwork created by students throughout the year.

Berkeley’s Concepts Art Show began in 1985 as an end-of-year showcase. Since then, it has become a beloved and highly anticipated annual event and art party to celebrate the magic that happens in the visual arts studios throughout the year. However, as regulations due to COVID-19 placed restrictions on large gatherings, Berkeley Preparatory School tasked Haneke Design with translating the 35^th Annual Concepts Art Show to the digital space.

Haneke Design created a website, https://www.conceptsartshow.com/, where visitors can view the student artwork and click to view the artist’s name as well as their graduating class. For the class of 2020, Berkeley wanted to do something special to highlight the seniors’ hard work throughout their final year at the school. The team at Haneke Design created a 3D Virtual Gallery (optimized for a desktop experience) that emulates a typical art gallery display using 3D rendering technology.

“Both the website and the 3D Virtual Gallery were a huge success,” said Stephanie Stuefer, Visual Arts Coordinator at Berkeley Preparatory School. “Because we could not be together in person for this year’s art show, we decided it was time to create a virtual version of our annual exhibit. Haneke Design was able to bring our vision to life in just 2.5 short weeks, and we are excited to continue using this digital space for years to come.”

The Virtual Gallery was built using Unity, a cross-platform development engine used primarily for augmented and virtual reality. To build the layout for the art gallery, Haneke Design’s development team used existing assets as a baseline for the 3D art gallery models in which they were able to seamlessly incorporate the students’ artwork.

Once the gallery was completed and working on the web, the Haneke team went one step further to create a fully immersive virtual reality version of the gallery for the Oculus GO. With this VR application, users are able to walk around in the virtual environment and observe the artwork as if they were there in person. This app will soon be available for download in the Oculus store.