The Met Replica transformed the halls of the largest museum in North America into an infinite metaverse playground, engaging kids to learn about art. Curators at The Met worked with animators to painstakingly replicate 40 artifacts into high fidelity Roblox virtual items. 5,000 years of art was scanned, ensuring that Replicas taken into Roblox looked like the original. For the first time, kids created their own personal avatars that became walking pieces of art history.

In Roblox, The Met’s facade and Great Hall were replicated so kids everywhere could visit the museum to learn about the collection.

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 education 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 engages 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 them 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.

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.

The exhibit launched in early August, leading into back-to-school. Prior, we began PR plus advertising on The Met’s social handles, website comms, in-museum stanchions, marketing cards and digital displays with a QR code to download the Replica app.

The app 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 in IRL, and replicated it in AR. Like magic, 5,000 years of art transformed from real to Roblox virtual items. 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–living on– and inspiring art education in perpetuity throughout the Roblox metaverse.

Additionally, The Met, built in 1870, 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 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.