Abstract:

This paper presents a continuous work in progress based on virtual reality techniques, aimed to introduce the user to the visual arts and to educate the audience visually. The project is an educational venture designed for engaging both teachers and learners in the intensive use of new technologies in the process of learning arts. The proof presented is based on the collection of costumes, decorative objects, furniture, jewelry and accessories made by Adina Nanu, that is presented to students at the courses of art style history and scenography. The collection is physically hardly accessible to a large public, and is now being made available to everyone as a virtual museum.

Following the communication of images through TV, computer and mobile devices, the most comfortable attire, jeans and shirt, spread across the globe, but various costumes are also known. The Romanian blouse is now trendy. Worn with trousers or skirt, it doesn’t always happily blend in the composition of the current costume. Therefore, we provide some clarification on its history, social significance and artistic expression. The Romanian blouse existed since prehistory and Antiquity, from the time of the local Dacian population, before the Roman occupation of the first century A.D. There were used, as today, the same materials provided by nature, flax and hemp, and the same techniques using straight panels, as they emerged from the loom, untailored with scissors and only assembled and sewn, as shown in the bas-reliefs on Trajan's Column in Rome. After Christianization in the early centuries A.D., the Romanian costume had to reveal the eyes as windows to the soul, but cover the body with clothing. Therefore it is not designed to work with sleeves, skirt or shorts and doesn’t highlight hints of “sexy”, cleavage, long hair or thin waist. Sculpturally the silhouette is that of a shaped column, modeled using grain fabric, with screen effect. In Western Europe this pattern became obsolete at the time of the Gothic style from the XIII - XV centuries, with the development of tailors' guilds in cities, with biais cuts, with darts and gussets. Pictorially the dominant colors of the folk costumes, white, black and red, testify the constancy of this pattern before the chromatic explosion of the Gothic style in stained glass, tapestries, miniatures and costumes. It's remarkable the unity between the regular geometry of the assembly and also the details in abstract, flat figures, lacking of volume, especially squares and crosses. Far from remaining unchanged, the Romanian folk costume evolved over time but having a solid structure it had the power to not imitate but to assimilate influences, melting them into its own composition, which hasn’t lost its identity. We will follow this subject in the virtual collection RetROMANIA.

Working with the new medium of virtual museum and designing new type of exhibitions imposed finding new ways of displaying art and new ways of using them for learning arts. The point of view from which the costumes are seen is that of a painter or sculptor and the main method of work is visual image reading, assessment of design, volumes and colors, of materials and trim details. The final product will be available in several different versions, on-line and off-line, of different levels of complexity, to be used from iPad to the advanced technology available in the Laboratory of Virtual Reality of our University.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, virtual museums, virtual environments, decorative arts, exhibition design, interactivity, 3D communication, interdisciplinarity, intercultural.