Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery came to us to help create a Virtual Reality experience. Whilst we’re not gaming programmers, the VR headsets required mapping points, in the form of patterns, on the walls to navigate and this is where our graphics skills were needed. Sounds easy. Well, apart from there could be no repetition of shapes or lines, each section had to be unique. And the room is huge…19 metres x 12 metres with a ceiling height of 4 metres. And lots and lots of nooks, crannies and detail such as plug sockets and radiators to work around.
Now, we could’ve just thrown a random array of shapes onto the walls, but why do that when we can customise the space and link it to a key feature in the room? The resulting design used the Greek friezes that can be seen in the gallery, these depict battle scenes with both male and female warriors, horses, shields and weapons. And there are four of them, one above each wall that we had to decorate. Each frieze was redrawn by hand meaning that there was never any repetition of shape or pattern, and peach circles were added to represent the shields, to give colour and visual breaks to the design. The result is abstract enough to look random, but you can pick out features from the frieze on closer inspection.
We used cut vinyl that allowed us to apply the graphics around the features of the room and adapt the design where required without breaking up the visual flow. The result is something completely unique to the space and linked to the BMAG collection. The gallery will be used as a space for visitors to explore the collection in new ways and we’re excited to see how the offer develops in the future.
Tracing the friezes and mocking up the design
Installing the graphics
