NEAL VR

NEAL VR is a museum experience developed in Unreal Engine 5 for Artis, a research group conducting a study on the neurological impact of art on the human brain.

Based in the University of Wien, Artis studies how art can enhance the well-being of individuals and societies through scientific, data-driven approaches.

NEAL is an Exploratory Network Model and Latent Profile Analysis of affective/cognitive aspects underlying shared, supraordinate responses to museum visual art. After conducting two sessions — one in person, another via browser — a substantial difference in the gathered data was noticed.

For this reason we developed a VR version of the experience to reintroduce a sense of reality and presence through the technology. The museum features six rooms, each hosting a painting from a world-famous painter of the past; its hexagonal architecture is designed not to suggest any specific order of exploration.

Each played iteration outputs a log folder containing data. Following the OGAR method, we built a blueprint-based plugin inside Unreal to gather player position at every tick, time spent looking at each painting, time spent in each room, and a heatmap to easily visualize the position data.