Visualise were approached by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in partnership with Facebook, to create an online virtual 360° exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s 5 Sunflower paintings. Van Gogh painted the Sunflowers in Southern France more than 125 years ago and following his death in 1890, the paintings were given new homes at five renowned museums in Europe, Asia and the United States. The virtual exhibition therefore marks the first time since their creation that all 5 paintings can be seen in one place.

We were supplied with high resolution scans of each painting from the galleries, however, sometimes the frames are nearly as important as the art… So we had to make 3D models of the frames that were exact replicas of the real thing. The resulting room is then explored in the Oculus Mobile headset (aka Gear VR), via a new app we built. This allows the viewer to choose which painting to look at and find out more information that floats up on request to the side of each picture. The exhibition is accompanied by commentary from Willem van Gogh, Vincent’s great-grand-nephew, who describes their history and significance in detail.

Once the interactive experience was built, we made a version for sharing on Facebook (above) – a 360° video grab of the experience that could be shared on the platform.

In Numbers…

• 6.8 million views
• 27.4 million people reached
• Over 200 articles
• 18 countries reached
• Featured in The New York Times, The Times, The Telegraph, Mashable & more