Virtual Galleries

About & privacy

A public place to walk great museum collections — and, sometimes, to walk them alongside other people.

What this is

Virtual Galleries turns open-access museum collections into rooms you can actually walk, with the artworks hung at their real physical size. Wander at your own pace, look closely at anything, or drop into the shared plaza where every collection meets and you may see other visitors moving beside you. No account, no score, no rush — a square you step into for a few minutes between things.

Walking together — and your privacy

When other people are in the same room as you, everyone sees everyone as a simple moving figure. This is the part that involves you, so here's exactly how it works, plainly:

• You're anonymous. You're given a random name and colour (like "Amber Visitor"). No sign-in, no email, nothing that identifies you.
• What others can see: your position as you walk, the direction you're facing, and — if you're looking closely at a work — its title ("looking at …"). That's all. No messages, no voice, no way to contact you.
• You can disappear anytime. Tap the 👥 here counter to go invisible — others stop seeing you instantly, and you can reappear whenever you like.
• Nothing about your movement is stored. Presence is live-only: it's relayed between whoever's present right then and kept nowhere afterwards.
• Analytics is privacy-first. We use cookieless, aggregate visit counts to see whether the place is working — no cookies, no cross-site tracking, no personal data.

The art & attribution

Every work shown here is public-domain or openly licensed (CC0, and a few CC BY), drawn from museums that publish their collections openly. Each artwork's label carries its title, artist, credit line, licence, and a link back to the museum's own record — attribution travels with the work, as it should. The galleries are curated by the museums' own data, not by users.

Open

Virtual Galleries is built as an open commons: the engine that generates these galleries is open, and the hosted experience is free to walk. It's an ongoing project — expect it to grow.