Dreams of Dalí is an interactive experience that takes viewers inside the surrealist master’s mind. To do so, it takes viewers 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 himself saw it in his mind, before the very first brush stroke. It lives as a VR experience at the museum in which viewers can move freely in the immersive environment and as a five-minute 360-degree interactive video in which they are guided by a music track. Both allow viewers to explore the wonders of Dalí’s imagination, hear the artist’s 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. Above all, Dreams of Dalí is a new and more engaged 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.

The museum’s target includes a broad audience of art lovers, old and young, who love to travel. They’re Salvador Dalí’s fans and can come from anywhere in the world, although they’re mostly from Florida and other states in the US. The visitor demographic skews older, so it’s important for the museum to attract younger audiences and establish itself as a destination since the city of St. Petersburg is not a tourism hub. The best way to do so is by establishing the museum as an innovator. So it launched a first-of-its-kind VR experience with unsurpassed attention to detail. We made it available for people anywhere in the world, from their mobiles or desktops, to experience what it feels like to go inside Dalí’s mind. And it was done using the new 360-degree interactive-video feature on YouTube and Facebook.

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, boasts the second-largest collection of the surreal master, but it still lacks national appeal. Today its visitors come mostly from Florida, so the museum asked us to generate national awareness of the museum’s newest exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination, and attract visitors by reaching out to a national audience and to art lovers around the world. At the same time, the work had to continue to elevate the institution’s profile as an innovator in the art world and get younger audiences interested in the work of Salvador Dalí. Last year saw a boom in virtual reality and 360-degree immersive videos with several brands and content creators jumping in to use the new technology using VR gadgets and/or the interactive video functionality now available at YouTube and Facebook.