The Hermitage's first fully virtual exhibition
In 2021 the State Hermitage Museum opened The Ethereal Aether — Europe's first virtual NFT exhibition, and the museum's first ever fully virtual show. My studio W3rlds (then Arhead) built the virtual world it lived in: a hall modelled on Saint Petersburg's old Stock Exchange, where anyone could walk in as an avatar and see the art.
The idea
A 250-year-old museum asking a simple, radical question: what is a museum when it goes fully virtual? Curated by Dimitri Ozerkov, the Hermitage's head of contemporary art, the show gathered NFT art — from CryptoKitties' "Schrödinger's Cat" to the St Petersburg artist Darkzuu and Claudia Hart's EVA — inside one built world rather than a flat web gallery.
What we built at W3rlds
We reconstructed the interior of the old Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange as a navigable 3D space and hung the exhibition inside it. Visitors created an avatar and explored on a laptop, a phone or in a VR headset — no app to install, no gatekeeper. It is the same conviction that runs through my work on immersive experiences for museums: the technology should deepen attention on the art, not compete with it.
Why it mattered
At the peak of the NFT argument, a landmark institution did not just mint a few tokens — it opened an entire virtual building the public could walk into. That is the honest version of an "immersive world": open, on any device, and built around real work. It is exactly the case I make in immersive worlds for brands and culture.
Coverage
Bringing an institution into an immersive world?
Museums, brands and cultural spaces that want a real, open, walk-in world — not a gimmick — are exactly what I help design and build. Book a call.
Book a callBuilt by W3rlds (then Arhead) for the State Hermitage Museum. Exhibition details and figures from public coverage (Euronews, FT Strategies). Hero image is an illustration, not a screenshot.