VR basketry display opens today in Nixon - Double Scoop - Arts in Nevada

This nonfiction contains further reporting by Jaedyn Young. 

UNR’s University Libraries is expanding its Virtual Museum of Native American Basketry task contiguous with the opening of a caller VR kiosk astatine the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitors Center successful Nixon. 

The “virtual museum” is simply a postulation of 3D scans of 100+ baskets by weavers from much than 25 Indigenous tribes. Users tin rotation done a depository that lone exists digitally and virtually “pick up” baskets, crook them over, and inspect them from each angles.

Billie Jean Guerrero, manager of the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitors Center, explained the value of basketry to section tribes: “Baskets were created to usage successful gathering, whether it were seeds oregon berries, conifer nuts—those are each nutrient sources that helped america past for thousands of years,” she said. “The women besides wore handbasket hats arsenic a mode to support from overheating.”

A batch of time, prayer, and accomplishment goes into making a basket, Guerrero said. “It’s not similar you tin conscionable prime it up close away. It takes years of practicing. It takes years of gathering materials, and past conscionable learning from others. I deliberation promoting that creation is very, precise important because, arsenic clip goes on, our fig of handbasket weavers seems to dwindle.”

This task isn’t the museum’s archetypal foray into VR programming. From 2017 until this year, the museum—situated connected the tribal onshore that immoderate 80,000 Burners thrust done each year—hosted a VR Burning Man installation. That task was created by the UNR libraries’ integer media team, a radical that often seeks retired caller uses for its expanding VR capabilities.

“We were trying to find a mode to bash 3D integer preservation projects,” said Luka Starmer, a multimedia specializer astatine UNR (who is besides a Double Scoop contributor). “We had experimented with different Indigenous objects similar petroglyph stones. Billie Jean pointed retired that this would beryllium truly chill for thing similar basketry.”

To make the basketry VR collection, the integer media squad worked with UNR’s Anthropology Research Museum, location to a ample postulation of humanities baskets. Several different institutions collaborated arsenic well, including a mates that could supply items by artists we cognize by name. The Nevada Historical Society lent entree to baskets by Northern Nevada’s best-known 19th-and-20th-century Washoe weaver, Dat So La Lee, and the Nevada State Museum provided entree to works by the modern Paiute-Shoshone creator Rebecca Eagle.

The opening reception for the caller Virtual Museum of Native American Basketry kiosk is today, Nov.10, from 1-3 p.m. astatine the Pyramid Lake Museum and Visitors Center, 709 State St., Nixon.

The Virtual Museum of Native American Basketry tin besides beryllium accessed astatine University Libraries’ @One Digital Media & Technology connected the archetypal level of the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center.

Viewers with a  SteamVR-ready virtual world headset tin download the virtual museum here.

Viewers without a VR headset tin presumption and “handle” the baskets digitally here.

This nonfiction was funded by a assistance from the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.