Dreams of Dalí is a virtual-reality experience that’s part of the museum’s newest exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination. It’s a 360-degree interactive video that takes viewers inside the surrealist master’s mind. To do so, it dives into one of his earlier paintings, The Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s “Angelus.” For the first time, people can see a painting how the painter saw it in his mind, before the very first brush stroke. The VR installation takes visitors on a journey into a fully immersive digital world in which they can move freely and explore the wonders of Dalí’s imagination. As they move around, they can hear his thoughts, find some of the famous creations that would come later in his career and, in the process, learn more about the life and work of the surrealist master. Dreams of Dalí is a new way to look at art.

First we launched a trailer of what was about to come. The VR experience was available one week later, as part of the museum’s new exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination. After opening weekend the experience became a 360-degree interactive video on Facebook and YouTube. Using their mobile devices, anyone could try it in virtual reality with VR gadgets like Google Cardboard and Gear VR. The experience starts in the museum with the viewer looking at the painting. The camera goes into the painting, and the world imagined by Dalí more than 80 years ago comes to life. The camera then takes the viewer to a ride around the painting and deep into Dalí’s mind, where they can find famous recurring elements of his work and his thoughts and even go inside and behind the towers depicted in the painting.

The exhibition Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination—which Dreams of Dalí is celebrating—runs from January 23 to June 12, and preliminary data shows that it had the most successful opening weekend in the museum’s history, with 26 percent more visitors than the previous best opening weekend. The five-minute online experience was also available as an interactive 360-degree video both on YouTube and on Facebook, and garnered over 2 million views without any media dollars. As a comparison, the museum receives 400,000 visitors every year. Dreams of Dalí yielded over 1.3 billion media impressions—worth over half a million dollars—for the exhibition and the museum. From the New York Times to WIRED, the Washington Post and Smithsonian, the coverage included technology, art, advertising and traditional news publications.