Two weeks before the country went into lockdown in March 2020, Auckland Art Gallery opened a major ticketed exhibition of historic art: Enchanted Worlds: Hokusai, Hiroshige and the Art of Edo Japan. They quickly needed to develop an alternate way to deliver the exhibition, and the resultant online experience at virtual.aucklandartgallery.com became the first in a planned series of virtual exhibitions built off a new digital platform as part of the gallery’s Covid-19 crisis response.

The virtual Enchanted Worlds was the first time the Gallery had offered the digital presentation of an entire exhibition free to the public online. Our goal was to deliver this via a bespoke and standardised virtual experience that is owned in perpetuity by the Gallery, rather than through a third-party supplier such as Google Arts and Culture. We worked with the gallery closely to deliver two large exhibitions over this period, Enchanted Worlds and the landmark contemporary Māori art exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora, the largest exhibition of contemporary Māori art in the gallery's history. To accompany these virtual exhibitions a series of videos and curator audio tours were also created, as well as event recap videos when the gallery was allowed to open to the public.