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Student art deserves better than a corridor
Artwork in schools usually gets two weeks on a pinboard and then a trip to the recycling bin. The SPARK 360 gallery gives it a permanent exhibition instead: a WebVR space built with A-Frame, where student pieces float as framed artworks inside a 360° city panorama, each with the artist's name beside it.
Because it's just a web page, it works everywhere. Slip on a VR headset and you're standing in the gallery. Open it in a browser and you can drag your way around the same space. Nothing to install, one URL to share with family.
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Git as the gallery wall
The hanging system is a GitHub repository. Every piece of art lives as an image file in an artwork folder, and the gallery builds itself from whatever it finds there. Add a file, and a new framed piece appears in the panorama. The layout logic makes sure artworks never overlap, so the space stays readable no matter how many pieces are hung.
This is the same publishing lesson as the arcade, wearing a different costume: a folder in a repo is the CMS, and committing a file is an act of publishing. A student's first pull request can be their own painting.
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The infinite auto-tour
Left alone, the gallery runs an endless guided tour: the camera flies smoothly from artwork to artwork, lingering on each piece like a patient museum-goer. Controls stay live the whole time, so the moment a viewer grabs the mouse or moves in the headset, they take over and the tour hands them the keys.
That makes it a perfect idle mode for the classroom's big display. Visitors walk into the room and the school community's art is literally floating past, introducing its artists one by one.
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A few pieces from the current exhibition
These are pulled straight from the live artwork folder, pixel art, Minecraft builds and landscapes from students across the year levels. Click any piece to see the full-size original.
A rotating mix hangs in the gallery at any time, so what you see in VR will keep changing as new work is committed.
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What it quietly teaches
On the surface it's an art show. Underneath, students are learning image formats and resolution, how 3D scenes are described in code, how version control works, and what curation means when space is infinite but attention isn't. And unlike the pinboard, this exhibition never comes down.
Step inside the gallery
This is the actual exhibition, live and explorable right here. Drag to look around, or open it full screen and put on a headset for the VR walk-through.
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