The Replica turned 2 million square feet of The Metropolitan Museum of Art into an immersive educational metaverse playground. With art education on the decline across NYC, The Met and Verizon stepped in to bridge the gap, leaning into technology as an incentive to inspire kids to learn about art.

Appealing to kids’ love of gaming and the importance of a unique metaverse persona, The Met Replica allowed users to build a personal Roblox avatar art collection.

The educational experience went beyond the physical walls of The Met, living on in a first-ever art museum in the Roblox metaverse.

Art museums aren't known for being tech-forward. It’s typically an analog experience. Quiet, look-but-don’t-touch, not exactly kid friendly. So if you’re a parent, you’re accustomed to major resistance and a quick visit “expiration.” The Met’s primary goal was to bridge the art education gap that has occurred due to budget cuts in New York. In order to create an engaging educational experience outside of the classroom, one that kids had to choose to engage with, Verizon knew the status quo would not suffice. We needed to be honest about what inspires kids by creating a tech education experience that could draw kids into the halls of the museum, and lean into what they’re really into: phones and gaming. Roblox is one of the most popular online games for kids 8-14 and, like Verizon and The Met, Roblox shares a brand goal of supporting education for today's youth. Today, with over 400 million users in the metaverse, 80% of whom are younger than 16, it presented us with an exciting socially responsible and unique cultural opportunity.

It’s no secret that the arts have been consistently cut from our nation’s schools.

In fact, the New York Department of Education has decreased spending on the arts by over 47% over the past 7 years. If art is no longer in the classroom, then the Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted to give the youth of New York a unique opportunity to bridge the gap in art education. Verizon and The Met have an existing partnership and a shared goal to inspire learning. For years, Verizon has been at the forefront of the effort to provide tech education to schools across America, ensuring that kids expand their worldview using our technology. Together, Verizon and The Met looked to create an art experience that could inspire a generation of new art lovers through technology.

Visit The Met. Enter the metaverse.

The Met Replica. The first ever real-world Roblox art collection at The Met.

The Met Replica is an interactive metaverse learning experience using mobile gaming as an incentive for art education. Find the original artwork IRL. And replicate it in AR. As the art transformed from real to Roblox, kids created their own personal avatars that became walking pieces of art history, mixing and matching with other virtual items to create something artfully one-of-a-kind. Replicas moved beyond the physical walls of The Met and into Roblox, living on and inspiring art education throughout the infinite space of the metaverse.

Bringing a project of this scale to The Met was multifaceted and took close to a year and a half.

We worked to create several different elements that brought the Replica experience to life. From developing a unique app that gave kids clues and guided them around the museum to replicating ancient artifacts and priceless artworks into Roblox items with realistic proportions, high fidelity and details, every phase of the project required our production partners to problem-solve.

Additionally, The Met was built in 1870, and like many art museums is built like a fortress with stone walls that make getting cell signal in every corner of the museum a challenge. Our production partner, Unit 9, placed a series of Bluetooth beacons throughout the museum that worked as homing devices to guide children to artifacts that could replicate to Roblox items. This also helped overcome the challenge of image recognition in the app when scanning objects in AR, due to inconsistent natural lighting conditions. We tested this process repeatedly over the course of several months with children of varying ages and heights to ensure that the app scanned properly.

The below timeline outlines our to-market process while working with curators at The Met and our production partners at Unit 9.

April-September 2022 : Discovery Phase

October 14, 2022 : Curation Briefing at the Met

November 1, 2022 : R1 of wireframes presented

November 7, 2022 : Roblox partnership conversations begin

November 15, 2022 : R2 of wireframes presented

November 20, 2022 : Curation list finalized with Met

December 5, 2022 : R3 of wireframes presented

December 13, 2022 : Design look & feel presented

January 9, 2023 : R1 Design presented

January 23, 2023 : R2 Design presented

February 22, 2023 : Design Finalized for App

April 6, 2023 : Alpha 1 presented

April 20, 2023 : Alpha 2 presented

May 9, 2023 : Visual Beta 1 presented

May 23, 2023 : Visual Beta 2 presented

June 6, 2023 : Functional Beta 1 presented

June 13, 2023 : Functional Beta 2 presented

June 17, 2023 : App submitted to stores for review

July 6-20 : Quality Assurance for application, in-museum testing

August 4, 2023 : App and Roblox collection live at The Met

The Replica was a first-of-its-kind exhibit, seamlessly capturing and transforming artwork in real time, in AR, into high fidelity virtual items to use as avatars in Roblox.

The exhibit hinged on an app that sent kids on an interactive, educational hunt turning 2 million sq ft of the largest museum in North America into an infinite metaverse playground.

Working with curators, we painstakingly replicated 40 artifacts into Roblox virtual items. With over 152 educational clues scattered around The Met, kids found the original artifact IRL, replicating it in AR. Like magic, 5,000 years of art transformed from real to Roblox virtual items. For the first time ever, kids created their own personal avatars that became walking pieces of art history, taking each Replica beyond the physical walls of The Met and into Roblox. There, they lived on to inspire art education in perpetuity throughout the Roblox gaming metaverse.

Families across the Tri-State area came to The Met to experience Replica and learn about art in a whole new way. Typical time spent for young museumgoers tripled, as kids raced to collect as many Replicas as they could within one visit. Many returned to collect them all. Children love the experience so much, The Met has chosen to continue the exhibit indefinitely.

With zero paid media:

Drove a 35% increase in foot traffic

Over 200,000 new Met visitors

426, 0000 Replica’s collected

1.4 billion impressions