The Mets’ burgeoning future extends beyond the museum

Last year I visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a trip to New York City to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. Like many visitors, I spent time exploring the museum’s vast collections, including the Temple of Tendur, an ancient Egyptian monument that has become The Met’s most recognizable landmark.

What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was how the temple came to be in New York City. Surrounded by crowds and moving between galleries, I never considered that the huge building in front of me had been carefully dismantled stone by stone in Egypt and reconstructed inside the museum.

It wasn’t until I explored Dendur Decoded, a new immersive experience from The Met, that the story really clicked.

Developed in partnership with the immersive exhibition platform Atopia, the immersive exhibit is available as a free VR experience through the Atopia app on MetaQuest headsets, while also accessible through a standard web browser. It allows visitors to visit the Temple of Tendur from anywhere in the world through interactive storytelling, historical context and digital reconstruction.

It is that deeper understanding that The Met hopes to achieve.

“We’ve been talking for a long time about why this was at The Met, and it didn’t click for a lot of people,” Brett Renfer, project manager for emerging and immersive technology at The Met, told UploadVR. “Let’s bring it to a new medium. Let’s show more than tell.”

Why Denture?

The Temple of Tendur was not chosen by chance.

According to Renfer, the monument continues to generate some of the most common questions visitors to The Met ask. Many people wonder if the structure inside the museum is real. Others question how an ancient Egyptian temple ended up in New York City.

Those questions helped make The Met a natural starting point for The Met’s first in-house immersive experience. Instead of asking the audience to absorb the history of the temple through visual text and visuals, the project puts them inside the story.

For The Met, the project serves a broader purpose than just audience engagement.

The same digital assets used to create the immersive experience will also support the preservation, research, documentation and future interpretation of the collection. Renfer described the work as having multiple lives, serving both the public-facing experiences and the museum’s long-term conservation goals.

Creating the Met’s first immersive experience

Renfer said The Met played a key role in shaping both the experience and its educational goals, while Denture Decoded is delivered through the Atopia platform.

The project began to explore how the museum’s growing archive of 3D assets could be used in new ways. Renfer created early prototypes using current scans of The Met to demonstrate how visitors can interact with digital representations of artifacts and environments in immersive spaces. Most of those assets were originally created through photography and other 3D capture techniques for conservation, research and documentation purposes. For the Temple of Tendur, The Met’s imaging team combined more than 28,000 photographs to create a detailed 3D model of the monument.

“We’ve never done a home VR project,” Renfer said. “We did all the content and feedback and all the scanning.”

Adobe eventually became a development partner and distribution platform. According to Renfer, the collaboration combined The Met’s curatorial expertise and archival research with a team that brought experience from game development and immersive design. The two companies worked together to translate historical research, photography, audio and 3D scans into an experience designed for virtual environments.

This collaboration extends beyond Denture Decoded. The Met’s second immersive experience, Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time, takes a different approach. Rather than recreating a physical museum space, it draws visitors into Oceania’s cultures and landscapes, connecting the artworks to the broader geographic and cultural context in which they emerged.

The partnership also reflected the practical reality of museum technology projects. While The Met maintains extensive 3D capture programs for conservation and research, those highly detailed scans don’t automatically lend themselves to real-time rendering in VR. Atopia’s team helped develop and adapt those properties while preserving their historical accuracy.

For Renfer, the project was more about building organizational knowledge.

“We need to build on this tacit knowledge,” he said, describing the project as an opportunity to learn how visitors engage with deeper content and how the museum might approach future endeavors.

Why Med Prioritize Reach over Hardware

One of the most surprising lessons from the project had little to do with virtual reality.

While Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are available on Meta Quest headsets, The Met has deliberately avoided VR as the primary target for the experiences.

Instead, the museum focused on access and accessibility.

“We had to choose the site with the greatest reach,” Renfer said. “A lot of people said, ‘Don’t you think the content was better for the Vision Pro audience?’ Listen to me, but we were doing our first thing, and then there’s the sort of thing that can be achieved.”

That conclusion appears to be validated by the data.

According to Renfer, about 85% of traffic to experiences comes through web browsers rather than VR headsets.

For a program built on high-speed technology, the numbers reinforce one of The Met’s key goals: outreach. While VR headsets offer a uniquely immersive way to experience content, internet access makes it possible for more people to engage.

A web-first approach is consistent with The Met’s broader mission of accessibility. Renfer said the museum wants to make sure experiences reach students, educators and curious visitors regardless of whether they have a headset.

That philosophy also influenced the design of experiences.

As someone who spends a significant amount of time in VR, one of the first things I noticed was how accessible the controls were. Navigation options are clearly explained, interactions are straightforward, and the onboarding process doesn’t take up any prior VR experience.

According to Renfer, that simplicity was intentional.

The Met conducted extensive user testing throughout development and adopted a universal design approach aimed at welcoming newcomers without creating barriers for more experienced users.

“We really believe in universal design,” Renfer said. “It’s good to help any user, it’s good for everyone.”

The result is an experience designed to welcome newcomers without alienating experienced VR users.

Experiences also allow for quiet moments of reflection. In Dendur Decoded, where viewers find themselves alone with the temple beneath a moonlit sky, Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time ends with a tranquil ocean scene at sunset. Neither sequence focuses primarily on teaching historical facts. Instead, they encourage visitors to pause and absorb what they’ve experienced, using atmosphere and traditional exhibits in ways that cannot easily be replicated.

Taking the long view

Unlike a startup chasing the next hardware cycle, The Med approaches high-speed technology with a very different timeline.

The museum’s 3D imaging teams are already creating detailed digital records of artifacts and environments through photography and laser scanning. Those digital assets can be reused for projects like Tendur Decoded, while continuing to serve archival functions behind the scenes.

That long-term perspective also affects how the museum evaluates emerging technologies.

During our conversation, Renfer discussed the growing interest in technologies such as Gaussian splotches, which are becoming increasingly popular for creating highly detailed 3D representations of real-world environments. When The Met examines technology, its security teams focus on standards and patterns that have been effective for decades.

“The team is really focused on what the standard is because everything we do is trying to be archival,” Renfer said.

The same philosophy shapes how the museum thinks about sites.

Although Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time were developed with Atopia, The Met was careful to ensure that the work was not permanently tied to one vendor.

“We made this our IP,” Renfer said. “Everything we built on stage came back to us.”

For a museum that traces its history back more than 150 years, that level of portability is important.

“We’re a 155-year-old company,” Renfer said. “Let’s manufacture it and use it somewhere else in five years.”

Beyond the museum walls

When I visited Tendur temple with my daughter, I saw an unusual monument. It wasn’t until I researched Denture Decoded at home that I fully understood the journey that brought it to New York.

That decision reflects what The Met believes immersive experiences can achieve. Projects like Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are not designed to replace the museum experience, but to extend it, offering visitors new ways to engage with art, history and culture beyond the gallery walls.

“We’ve been telling the story for a long time about why it was at The Met, and it didn’t click with a lot of people,” Renfer told UploadVR. “Let’s bring it to a new medium. Let’s show more than tell.”

Dendur Decoded and Oceania: A New Horizon of Space and Time are available for free on Meta Quest VR headsets through the Atopia app and can also be accessed through a web browser.