Today art viewers are still limited to one point of view. But what if we could go inside one of Dalí’s paintings? What if we could see it the same way he saw in his mind? Dreams of Dalí takes viewers around the world inside the surrealist master’s mind and imagines what The Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus looked like before his very first brush stroke. The VR experience takes museumgoers and the online audience for a journey into one of his earlier paintings and attracted visitors to the museum’s exhibition with a new way to look at art. Once inside, users can explore the wonders of Dalí’s imagination, 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.

First we launched a trailer teasing on the experience. A week later the VR experience was available as part of the museum’s new exhibition Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination. After the opening weekend, the experience became a 360-degree interactive video on Facebook and YouTube. Using their mobiles anyone could try it in virtual reality with VR gadgets like Google Cardboard and Gear VR. Dreams of Dalí starts in the museum, looking at the artist’s painting. The camera moves towards the painting and dives into the environment. The world imagined and painted in 2D by Dalí more than 80 years ago suddenly becomes real, three-dimensional and fully immersive, with sound and motion. To bring Dalí’s world to life, we worked closely with curators and researched the artist’s work and the museum permanent collection. Dreams of Dalí is now in the permanent exhibition at the museum and online.

The exhibition Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination—which Dreams of Dalí was 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 dollar. As a comparison, the museum receives four hundred thousand visitors every year. Dreams of Dalí yielded over 1 billion media impressions for the exhibition and the museum, worth over half a million dollars. From the New York Times to Wired, The Washington Post and The Smithsonian, the coverage it received included technology, art, advertising and traditional news publications.

To promote the museum’s newest exhibition, we created a virtual reality experience that lives within the exhibition. What’s more, we created a more engaged way to look at art, one that opens infinite possibilities to museums and artists. In doing so we expanded on the artist’s universe and brought visitors and viewers along for the ride. And by going inside the artist’s mind, we updated his world for a new audience, created new applications for where the museum experience can go next and showed a clear path for what VR can do both for the advertising and the art world.

Last year saw the boom of virtual reality and 360-degree videos, with brands jumping in to use the new technology, but most lack concept or purpose. YouTube and Facebook launched their 360-degree interactive video functionality and YouTube even allows users to experience them with virtual reality gadgets. Dalí always said that his paintings were photos of his dreams. He imagined these places before painting. So in Disney’s style we decided to bring his world to life in VR. And we did it by creating an installation and an online experience that took people into his mind. The campaign included a teaser trailer, a virtual reality experience that was part of the museum’s exhibition it was created to promote, 360-degree videos that lived on YouTube and Facebook and posters. It was targeted at art lovers, nationally and internationally, and focused on younger audiences interested in new ways of enjoying art.

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, boasts the second largest collection of the surrealist master, but it still lacks national appeal. Today its visitors come mostly from Florida, so the museum asked us to generate national awareness about the newest museum’s exhibition, Disney and Dalí: Architects of the Imagination, and attract visitors—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 the boom of 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.