How to Create a Virtual Exhibition: College’s VR Art Show Shared Worldwide

Kyla Ball May 21, 2025

When their usual arts venue became unavailable for Nottingham College’s end-of-year show, the organizers found the ideal way to recreate and share the works as a virtual, online exhibition with ThingLink.

Background: Nottingham College

Nottingham College in the UK provides a wide range of education for students aged 14 and up, including vocational, further and higher education courses, degrees, and diplomas, as well as courses for home-educated young people. Their Access to Art course is a year-long course designed for students who aim to move on to a degree in art or an arts-based subject, and is generally undertaken by 16-17 year olds, and some mature students who are returning to learning.

The Challenge: No Physical Exhibition Space Available

Each year the students’ final pieces are displayed in the end of year show at the Stoney Street Campus, alongside the work by the Fine Art degree students. However this year, a major construction project meant this exhibition space wasn’t available to host the show or any visitors. An alternative space in Nottingham’s principal art gallery, Nottingham Contemporary, was secured to exhibit the art pieces. However there was only enough room for one exhibition, meaning that the Access to Art students would have no gallery space available to them. This meant that not only would they miss out on being able to invite friends and families to view their work, but that they and the college would miss out on the opportunity to show off their talents to prospective industry employers, sponsors and tutors from other universities.

The Solution: An Interactive Virtual Art Gallery in ThingLink

Kate Whyles is a Digital Innovation and Development Coach in the college’s Learning Technologies Team, and is responsible for the creative curriculum areas. Having seen ThingLink used for virtual exhibitions elsewhere, Kate suggested the platform as an alternative. 

The works were hung in the Stoney Street Campus Gallery and Kate used a Ricoh Theta 360° camera on a tripod to capture spherical images of each space. After uploading the 360° images to ThingLink and creating each space as a 360° scene, Kate was then able to add interactive tags. Working alongside the Access to Art students, she then created a template for the text and media tag that would accompany each student’s work. This contained: name, inspiration, story or narrative to the work, and progression details (eg course and destination) for that student after graduation. 

ThingLink allows you to customize your tag icons, so custom tags were created to display the relevant student’s name. The students chose atmospheric background music from Pixabay to accompany each space and each tag. The scenes were then linked to each other using Transit tags, creating a virtual tour around the exhibition space. You can explore the virtual space below!

How the Virtual Art Exhibition Was Shared

ThingLink lets you share content in various different formats, all from one platform. So the team shared the exhibition as a virtual event on the night of the degree show, by adding the ThingLink to Meta Quest virtual reality headsets. These were placed in one section of the gallery. The same immersive exhibition was also shared via QR codes around the gallery, for visitors to view on their personal devices. Simultaneously, it was shared to a large format screen, which visitors could navigate around themselves.

In addition, the virtual exhibition was shared as a simple URL – via email, on the students’ personal websites and social media. This was particularly powerful for the international students, who could let their friends and families around the world experience the event as if they were there in person. Even for those whose families lived close to home benefitted as it widened access to those who may have been unable to attend a real-life event for any other reason.

How the Virtual Exhibition Benefitted Both the Students and the College

The fact that they were able to share the exhibition so widely provided a number of additional benefits for the students.

• Many students sent it as a link to prospective employees, sponsors and universities – showing not only their talent as an artist, but also their expertise and experience in curating a collaborative exhibition both in a real and virtual space. In this way, the ThingLink acts as a virtual resume or CV for them.

• The college has also been able to use the virtual exhibition created through ThingLink as an example of best practice. As Kate says, “It’s changed the way we record things.” Instead of creating and printing an exhibition catalogue, the college now has a perpetual digital catalogue, which can easily be shared for industry days, for example.

• The college will also use it as inspiration for future students on the Access to Art course, to show how their work might be curated and displayed in the final exhibition, and to give examples of the type of media that can be created.

ThingLink: The Easiest Way to Create Virtual Exhibitions

ThingLink is the most user-friendly online platform for creating and sharing digital exhibitions. No design experience required, and no coding needed – even beginners can build a high-quality virtual exhibition that can be quickly and easily shared with a global audience across multiple media platforms and channels. And if your real-world exhibition space is updated? With ThingLink, it’s easy and instant to update both the background media and in-tag media, with updates applied in real-time, everywhere it’s shared.

As well as virtual exhibitions, ThingLink’s new AR App lets your exhibition visitors interact with your displays on their own mobile devices. Read more about this incredibly simple but powerfully engaging new tool below.

Further reading

Ohio art gallery uses ThingLink AR Solution to create an augmented reality guided tour to an exhibition for in-person visitors.

Royal Ontario Museum creates virtual museum tour with ThingLink, including multimedia content in the interactive tags.

Highland Folk Museum creates virtual tour of their open air museum – including embeds of 3d models

No exhibition space? No problem! Create a 360° digital art exhibition with our Canva online gallery template.

Watch:

Visit our YouTube channel to watch our Webinars with more examples of ThingLink in action, including guidance and tutorials on creating immersive content.