Unfurling History

Project Overview

“Unfurling History” aims to use VR to learn more about Chinese Traditional hand-scroll paintings and break the limitations of the conventional viewing method from traditional museum setting

Goal:

Design a VR experience that honors the historical way Chinese hand-scrolls were viewed—bit by bit—while overcoming museum display limits. Using curved UI surfaces and a narrative “fall-into-the-art” transition, the project presents ultra-wide scrolls without fragmenting them, connects the artwork to its natural landscape, and maintains immersion and clarity for storytelling.

Target Audience:

Timeline:

Project type:

Graduate project focusing on VR Design and Art History

4 Weeks | March - May 2023

Museums, Educational programs, school day trips, art historians

A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, by Wang Ximeng in 1113, (20 by 469 inches)

Inspiration

Inspired by interactive projections of landscape painting, this project reimagines how Chinese hand-scroll paintings are shown. In most museums, they sit immobilized in long glass cases, a format that celebrates material grandeur but obscures their original social function. Historically, scholars unrolled these scrolls gradually, encountering the landscape section by section as a paced, linear narrative.

This prototype asks whether we can preserve the sequential mode by adjusting the scale. In VR, viewers step into the work’s world, experiencing the dialogue between painted scenes and the natural terrain that inspired them. Enlarging the scroll sustains the “see-a-part, sense-the-whole” rhythm: only a portion is visible at once, yet the spatial context and continuity of the full composition remain legible.

VR Features ：

The first feature is using “CurvedUIScreens” to present the artwork undisturbed. Due to the size, storytelling nature, and extreme aspect ratio of the artwork, it is difficult to divide the painting into small sections. After trying several methods, the script I learned from other people worked best for the project.

Second, the project also fixed the collider issue by adopting a traditional fable that is similar to “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. Found a crack on the path and fell into a mystical work of art and beautiful mountains.

Future Development:

  • Provide more interaction with the painting, and add icons to explain details of the artist’s choices

  • Add animation in the second screen, which helps users to feel the change rather than the feeling of “jumping”

  • incorporate more paintings, and compare and contrast horizontal and vertical scroll paintings