The viewing room in 2026: Technological gadget or selling machine?

The viewing room, that hybrid space somewhere between the white cube gallery and the e-commerce site, has mutated. What began as an emergency solution has become an industry, with its own codes, its massive technological investments, and its internal contradictions. The question is no longer whether it will replace the physical gallery — it will not, or at least not entirely — but rather what it reveals about the balance of power between art, money, and technology in the mid-2020s.

01From white cube to digital white cube: a brief genealogy

The "white cube" — that gallery model with its immaculate walls, born at MoMA in New York in the 1930s under the influence of Alfred Barr — has always been an ideological space as much as an architectural one. Brian O'Doherty demonstrated this in 1976 in his essays Inside the White Cube: to neutralize context is already a form of manipulation. The digital viewing room inherits this founding ambiguity, but amplifies it considerably.

Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Gagosian were the first major galleries to build viewing rooms worthy of the name, from 2020 onward. David Zwirner, notably, had anticipated the shift by launching his internal e-commerce platform in 2017, allowing collectors in Asia to acquire works during New York business hours. When COVID struck, the infrastructure was already in place. Second-tier galleries, for their part, often cobbled together solutions on Artsy or Artnet, with uneven results.

What changed between 2020 and 2026 is the nature of the medium itself. We moved from the enhanced PDF — a series of high-definition photographs with a technical data sheet — to three-dimensional environments built in Unreal Engine 5, navigable with a Meta Quest 3 headset or the new XREAL ROG R1 glasses unveiled at CES 2026. The entry price for users: between 499 dollars for the entry-level Meta headset and 3,499 dollars for the Apple Vision Pro. The question of democratization thus arises immediately.

02The technology behind the experience: what galleries don't tell you

Building a serious viewing room in 2026 costs between 50,000 and 500,000 dollars, according to industry professionals. This range covers very different realities. At the low end, you have a basic virtual tour using photogrammetry — dozens of photographs assembled by software like Polycam or Matterport to recreate a space in three dimensions. At the high end, you have bespoke environments developed with Unreal Engine 5, equipped with foveated rendering (the system that optimizes graphical rendering based on where the user's gaze falls, saving up to 40% of computing power), eye tracking, and spatialized sound in Dolby Atmos.

NeRF technology — Neural Radiance Fields — deserves particular mention. Developed by researchers at UC Berkeley in 2020, this method of 3D reconstruction from ordinary photographs was commercialized by startups like Luma AI. It makes it possible to recreate a gallery room with near-photographic precision, including reflections on frames and variations in natural light — elements that older LiDAR scans rendered in ways that were often flat and overly geometric.

The integration of the works themselves remains the most delicate challenge. Digital representation rights are subject to separate negotiations from physical exhibition rights, and few artists signed contracts in 2015 that anticipated VR. Galleries are navigating considerable legal ambiguity, particularly around works by deceased artists whose rights holders sometimes prove extremely exacting — or extremely opportunistic, depending on the case.

03Refik Anadol and the natively "viewing room" artists

Some artists have so thoroughly merged with the viewing room ecosystem that it becomes difficult to distinguish their work from its mode of presentation. Refik Anadol is the most frequently cited example, sometimes to excess. His Los Angeles studio — which employs machine learning engineers, composers, and designers — produces works such as Machine Hallucinations (2021) and Unsupervised (exhibited at MoMA in New York in 2022-2023), installations in which massive datasets are transformed into AI-generated visual flows. These works exist in both registers — physical and digital — but their transposition into a viewing room generates no substantial loss of experience, unlike a canvas by Cy Twombly or a sculpture by Richard Serra.

Ian Cheng represents a different, more radical approach. His "BOBs" — artificial intelligence simulations that Cheng calls "eggheads with expanding minds" — evolve in real time, which means their presentation in a viewing room is not a reproduction of the work but a distinct instance of it. Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (2021), distributed via Apple TV+, blurred the boundaries still further between contemporary art, animation, and streaming platform.

TeamLab, the Japanese collective of 400 people founded by Toshiyuki Inoko, remains the benchmark for immersive installations. Borderless, in Tokyo, welcomed 2.3 million visitors in 2019 before its temporary closure. A viewing room version of their works exists, but it functions differently: for TeamLab, the physical space and the collective presence of bodies are constitutive of the experience. The solo digital transposition is inevitably diminished — something the team itself readily acknowledges.

04The market behind the curtain: who sells, who buys, at what price

Art Basel launched its Online Viewing Rooms in 2020 and quickly noticed that the most significant transactions were rarely concluded online. Works priced under 50,000 dollars found buyers through digital platforms; above that threshold, collectors generally insisted on seeing the work in person, or at least speaking directly with the gallerist. This pattern has since stabilized, with a few notable exceptions during the 2023 and 2024 editions of the fair, where six-figure works were acquired via Vision Pro in demonstrations that received considerable press coverage — and were also very carefully orchestrated.

The landmark sale that best illustrated the ambiguities of the digital market remains Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie's in March 2021: 69.3 million dollars for an NFT, breaking records for a living artist at a traditional auction house. The crash that followed — NFT prices fell between 80 and 97% between 2022 and 2023 depending on the segment — dampened enthusiasm considerably. Sotheby's, which had opened its "Natively Digital" space with great fanfare, quietly demoted it to the status of a secondary initiative.

What remains, and this is significant, is the infrastructure. Smart contracts on Ethereum now allow galleries to collect royalties on secondary resales — typically between 5 and 10%. For artists whose works are actively traded on the secondary market, this is a quiet but genuine revolution, one that the physical market made structurally impossible.

05Surveillance at the heart of the business model

Here is what viewing rooms do not readily reveal about their own functioning: the data you generate by visiting them constitutes a trove of information of a precision that any luxury brand manager would envy. The eye tracking built into Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro headsets records, to the millisecond, what your gaze falls on, how long you hold it, and in what order you move through the space. Meta acknowledged, in its revised terms of service in 2023, that it collects this ocular biometric data to "improve the user experience" — a formulation vague enough to cover a great deal of ground.

Apple adopted a different posture, technically prohibiting third-party advertising within Vision Pro, but retaining browsing data within its own ecosystem. The EU AI Act, which came into force in 2024, imposes transparency obligations on these behavioral biometric systems, but its application in the specific context of art viewing rooms remains largely theoretical — regulators lacking both the sectoral expertise and the inspection resources required.

Hito Steyerl, the German artist and theorist whose work dissects the relationships between images, power, and surveillance, had anticipated this dynamic in How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). A work whose irony has only deepened with time: the viewing rooms of 2026 are precisely spaces where your visual behavior is quantified, stored, and potentially monetized, while you serenely contemplate a watercolor of considerable price.

06Access as a selling point: what the democratic promise conceals

The argument most frequently advanced by viewing room advocates can be summed up in a few words: thanks to them, an art lover in Lagos, Seoul, or Guadalajara can visit an exhibition in Chelsea without a plane ticket. This is true, and it is not nothing. Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, regularly defends this position with his well-known enthusiasm for new forms of dissemination.

But the argument stumbles over its own conditions of possibility. A Meta Quest 3 headset at 499 dollars represents several months of median salary in most countries where access to physical art is genuinely limited. The XREAL ROG R1, the AR glasses developed in collaboration with ASUS and unveiled at CES 2026 at 649 dollars, explicitly target the premium gaming market. The Apple Vision Pro at 3,499 dollars does not even pretend to democratization.

What is genuinely being democratized is access to 2D viewing rooms — virtual tours viewable on a phone or computer, without any specialized equipment. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner all offer freely accessible browser-based versions. These formats do reach new audiences, and the traffic data confirms it: Hauser & Wirth reported a 340% increase in unique visitors to its site between 2019 and 2021, with a radically expanded geographic spread. But converting a digital visitor into a collector — even of small-format works, even of prints — remains a challenge that most galleries have yet to solve.

07What 2026 reveals that 2020 could not see

The viewing room is neither the future of art nor a gadget with no tomorrow. It is something more interesting and more ambiguous: a revealer. It reveals the structural tensions of the contemporary art market — between exclusivity and accessibility, between symbolic value and commercial transaction, between Benjaminian aura and digital reproducibility. It also reveals the geopolitical fault lines within the tech sector, with a standards war between Meta, Apple, and Asian players like XREAL that will determine which visual infrastructure dominates the next decade.

What happened between 2020 and 2026 resembles, at bottom, less a revolution than an unfinished normalization. Viewing rooms became commonplace without ever truly becoming democratic. They generated sales without transforming the market. They produced new artistic forms without dethroning the old ones. The question Jerry Saltz poses — must art be seen "in real life" to have value? — has found no definitive answer. It has simply been asked differently, as the boundary between the real and the digital became less a line than a gradient.

The nineteenth-century panorama — that great circular canvas that plunged the Parisian spectator into the Battle of Waterloo or the streets of Jerusalem — also offered total immersion, a technology of illusion carefully commercialized and decried by the purists of its time. It eventually disappeared, not because it had failed, but because cinema rendered it obsolete. What will replace the viewing room may not yet exist. What is certain is that the next rupture will probably look nothing like what the conferences in Las Vegas are predicting.