Vermeer’s artworks are among the rarest in the world - there are only 36 known to exist today (including one that has been stolen), scattered between 18 art collections in 7 countries and it would not be technically possible to create a physical exhibition of his complete oeuvre.

To solve this issue, we brought together all of Vermeer’s 36 known paintings under one roof: a gallery in AR. Pocket Gallery was created in partnership with designers and architects, and curated by the Mauritshuis museum, the leading expert on Vermeer.

“Pocket Gallery” creates a curated and life-size virtual space that brings together all 36 Vermeer artworks for the first time. It allows you to step into a digital exhibition space of Vermeer’s complete oeuvre that could never exist in the physical world, to navigate freely from room to room and move up close to see the paintings at brush stroke-level, in a new interactive way.

It was built in collaboration between design/engineer team, architects (Carmody Groarke), and curators (Mauritshuis).

The design is the logical space that you would create if you took Vermeer's 36 works and hung them thematically and built a space just dedicated to that end. It was also thought as to make the museum architecturally interesting from the outside.

The space is divided up into several thematic rooms which have been tailored to displaying the works.

We spent 1 week in a sprint with several members of the Daydream team and our own engineering team to explore how AR could be used in GA&C. We prototyped several AR ideas together, including the first version of Pocket Gallery. Between this sprint and the launch of Pocket Gallery, we also performed a few user studies and did plenty of testing within the team. The design of both the gallery space and the interactions in the feature were challenging because we were trying to build something that had never been done before.

Vermeer was a perfect choice for the first Pocket Gallery because of the impossibility to set up a real-life retrospective of his work, and we work closely with the Mauritshuis to develop the gallery space where you can now explore the artworks.

Pocket Gallery was the fruit of joint efforts from various expert teams: by the GA&C and Google Android engineering team, GA&C content leads, the Mauritshuis, architects from Carmody Groarke.

The initial sprint was in January 2018, and Pocket Gallery was finalized on December 3 for the launch of "Meet Vermeer" on GA&C, marked by a press event hosted at the Maurtishuis. Pocket Gallery is now part of the GA&C Camera Tab feature (which includes Art Selfie, Color Palette and Art Projector) which aims to provide new audiences with engaging and interactive ways to explore cultural content.

Pocket Gallery was widely appreciated by the press (including the New York Times and Mashable) and on social by GA&C, partner cultural institutions and users.

Social:

- 50M impressions

- 1.5M engagements

PR:

- +350 articles including the NY Times, Mashable and Gizmodo

Product:

- The Gallery was entered 75k times since its launch

- The "Meet Vermeer" project was visited by 1.5M visitors.

Endorsements:

> The Minister for Culture Ingrid van Engelshoven gave a speech at the event and endorsed the initiative, also on Twitter

> Endorsement from the Alderman for Culture from the city The Hague (our political capital) on Twitter.

> 5 Youtube Creators’ videos addressing different aspects of Vermeer’s work (from the US, DE, ES, and JP)

Please note that as we are a non-profit entity, we don't have sales objectives.