Zlaten del Castillo

Creative Director • Interactive Digital & Physical Experiences

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Verizon: The MET Replica

Client:

Verizon / The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)

Production:

UNIT9

Role:

Creative Director (with Veronika Watson-Kuc)

Year:

2023

Verizon and The Met wanted to give a new generation of kids a reason to walk through the doors of the largest art institution in North America.

The answer was The Met Replica: the first real-world Roblox art collection at The Met.

Kids used an AR app to hunt 40 original artefacts, from a 14th-century Japanese suit of armour to Van Gogh's straw hat, across two million square feet of museum, replicating each one as a collectible digital item.

Those replicas became avatar items wearable inside the Met's own Roblox world, and a full virtual reconstruction of The Met, including its iconic facade and Great Hall, was built inside Roblox for kids who couldn't visit in person. Two years in the making.

Learn how was it made ↓

Results

200K

New MET Visitors

35%

Increase

In Foot traffic

426k

Replicas Collected

1.4

Billion

Impressions

Awards

Cannes Lions

5 x Shortlist

Clios

3 x Gold

2 x Silver

2 x Bronze

One Show

1 x Gold

1 x Silver

2 x Bronze

Art Directors Club

2 x Gold

5 x Silver

Webby

3 x Winner

Shorty

7 x Winner

FWA

FWA of the Day

AdAge

Best Partnership

Communication Arts

Award of Excellence

How was it made?

Making AR work inside a museum

The core challenge was making AR work reliably inside one of the world's most visited buildings: two million square feet of stone, marble, and metal, with no GPS signal and thousands of visitors moving through simultaneously.

The solution was a network of Bluetooth beacons combined with image-recognition technology that could identify specific artefacts and trigger AR overlays in real time.

152 clues, 40 artefacts

Making it educational rather than just entertaining required a different kind of rigour. The team worked closely with curators across galleries within The Met to interpret and adapt 40 artifacts, ensuring each one was accurate enough to function as a genuine piece of art education, and appeal a young audience.

152 educational clues were embedded throughout the experience, each tied to a specific work in the collection.

Perseus with the Head of Medusa, the adaptation for the Roblox game

Building a museum inside Roblox

In parallel, the Roblox deliverable was an entirely separate body of work: a virtual reconstruction of The Met itself, built using Roblox Studio, and designed to feel like a genuine extension of the physical museum.

What it meant for The Met

The experience didn't close after a weekend activation. It ran inside one of the world's most visited museums for months, woven into the daily flow of real visitors: families, school groups, and children moving through galleries with a phone in their hand, hunting for artefacts, learning about a 5,000-year-old collection without it feeling like a lesson.

The 35% increase in foot traffic and 200,000 new visitors weren't just campaign numbers. They reflected an experience that worked in the context it was built for: a real museum, with real people, every day.

Gallery

Next Project: Riot Games Battle of Baron

Zlaten del Castillo

Creative Director

London, UK

Brussels, Belgium

Available globally

All work shown with permission. All rights belong to the respective clients and production companies.

hello@zlaten.me