Responses by MONOGRID.

Background: The Galleria Ideale redefines traditional museum digital tours into an immersive platform where global visitors can explore and personally engage with the Urbino, Italy–based Galleria Nazionale della Marche’s collections. Users can even curate and share their selections of featured works, deepening their connection with art. This project was a cornerstone of a broader campaign to increase online and in-person visits, serving as a standalone digital attraction and an innovative educational tool.

Design core: The core features are centered around the Galleria Ideale, a six-story 3-D palace enhanced by AI-generated 3-D textures that create trompe-l’œil effects and a narrating voice that adds context and a human touch. We combined sophisticated digital painting techniques and AI to create interactive elements that echo the physical museum’s architecture and identity.

Favorite details: We are particularly proud of the top-floor feature, which allows users to curate and share their personal art collections on social media and via URL—a strategic move to encourage ongoing engagement and broaden the gallery’s reach online.

Challenges: The extensive research required to translate the National Gallery’s art collection and history into a coherent format that wasn’t just a digital twin. Our team delved deep into the museum’s archive, using AI to process and generate textures for complex trompe-l’œil effects on various architectural features like doors, windows and facades—all in different sizes and positions—ensuring consistency throughout. Additionally, we crafted unique room layouts and styles (inspired by the artworks displayed within) using Unity, delivering a curated virtual experience that diverged from the museum’s physical layout, as requested. We chose a painterly look and feel to highlight the artistic content while playing to Unity’s gaming-oriented strengths, with controlled camera paths and interactive storytelling elements like the narrating voice and informational hotspots to enrich user navigation.

Navigational structure: Accompanied by a narrating voice, users initially land in an idealized Renaissance city inspired by the museum’s pivotal artwork, La Città Ideale, where their journey through the six-story suspended Galleria Ideale palace begins. Each floor immerses visitors in distinct historical and artistic eras, enhanced by bespoke soundtracks and effects.

Interactive hotspots and dynamic content loading enhance the navigation, allowing users to engage with the art up close and intuitively without overwhelming them with information. The top floor is a standout feature of the entire experience: here, users can curate and share their collections and discover custom pathways through their selected artworks. This personalized interactive element encourages repeat visits, offering new combinations and perspectives with each return.

Technology: We used Unity to create the 3-D-modeled environments and trompe-l’œil effects, while Midjourney facilitated mood boards and dynamic content generation.

For web development, our in-house Unity WebGL converter library enabled us to seamlessly export the 3-D scene, lighting and camera movement from Unity to a WebGL experiment and integrate interactive events such as mouse over and click from the 3-D environment into HTML5 elements like image galleries and text boxes. With the Swiper library, we developed a smooth, responsive gallery navigation system that made browsing vast collections of works easy. For animations, we turned to the GSAP library. Lastly, we implemented Howler for precise audio management and incorporating bespoke soundtracks and effects.