When Eric Mosinger returned home after visiting the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, he wished he could keep exploring. Time spent in the galleries hadn’t been enough.
It wasn’t the first time he’d looked for a virtual museum experience. Years earlier, after buying an Oculus Go, he immediately searched for a VR version of Google Arts & Culture. Google Arts & Culture had already made millions of artworks available online, and he assumed a VR version would eventually arrive.
“I said, ‘That’s okay. They’ll release it soon,'” he recalled. “Then I got the Quest 2 and they didn’t have it.”
Eventually, he decided to build the museum experience he wanted himself.
“A museum is just a cube with JPEGs on the walls,” he joked. “How hard could it be?”
“It turns out that it’s very, very hard.”
Fortunately, he added, “I’m very stubborn.”
That idea eventually grew into ArtQuest VR, one of VR’s most ambitious virtual museums. Its latest expansion adds two new DLC collections, Sculpture & Decorative Arts and Ancient Art & Archaeology, bringing more than 1,400 three-dimensional sculptures and artifacts spanning prehistory through the modern era.
If you’re new to ArtQuest VR, you can also read our previous hands-on impression, which takes a closer look at the app’s core museum experience.
The collections draw from digitization projects and publicly available scans from institutions including the Louvre Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Pergamon Museum.
Building The Museum He Couldn’t Find
Mosinger isn’t a professional game developer. He’s a university professor who taught himself enough Unity to build the museum experience he couldn’t find. ArtQuest grew from a simple desire to spend more time with the artwork that had inspired him during museum visits.
The Getty Museum, in particular, left its mark on the app. The default gallery inside ArtQuest is modeled after one of the museum’s Impressionist galleries, complete with gray walls and skylights.
His earliest prototype used artwork from Google Arts & Culture before he realized he couldn’t use those images in a publicly distributed app. He rebuilt the project using public domain artwork from Wikimedia Commons, gradually expanding the collection while teaching himself Unity and everything else required to build a virtual museum.
Adding sculpture required a completely different workflow.
Unlike paintings, which can often be sourced through public domain archives, sculptures and archaeological artifacts had to be gathered individually from museum digitization projects and public photogrammetry collections. Each model then required careful optimization before it could run smoothly on standalone Quest hardware.
Many scans begin with millions of polygons.
“They need to be decimated down to about 150,000 polys at most without completely destroying them,” Mosinger explained. “You can look at a model or an image whose resolution looks fine on a computer screen. Once you’re in VR and you can get right up to it, suddenly it just snaps you right out of VR.”
Mosinger doesn’t just import everything he finds. He curates every addition himself, checking licenses, evaluating scan quality, repairing models when necessary, and deciding whether each piece meets the standard he wants users to experience.
Seeing Art A Little Differently
Spending time in ArtQuest changed the way I looked at paintings.
I kept finding myself lingering in front of works that I probably would have walked past in a museum. Walking right up to a canvas, I could study individual brushstrokes, the raised texture where paint had been layered over centuries, and even the subtle weave of the canvas beneath. They were details I’d never noticed before.
The Mona Lisa was a great example. While nothing replaces seeing the original, ArtQuest offers something museums often can’t: the ability to quietly spend as much time as you want with a single painting, free from crowds, glass barriers, or the pressure to keep moving.
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Viewing paintings in my “favorites” gallery
The new Sculpture & Decorative Arts and Ancient Art & Archaeology collections expand that experience beyond paintings. The range is impressive, from tiny carved figures that invite close inspection to full-scale sculptures like Michelangelo’s David and monumental archaeological works such as the Temple of Dendur. Many sculptures can be explored at your own pace by walking around them, or you can set them to rotate, making it easy to study every angle without moving around your play space.
Whether I was studying a painting or circling a centuries-old sculpture, I found myself slowing down and spending more time with each work than I normally would.
When I described that experience, Mosinger smiled.
“It’s what I had hoped to accomplish.”
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Viewing Ancient Art & Sculpture
Designed For Curiosity
Although ArtQuest naturally appeals to museum enthusiasts, Mosinger hopes it also reaches people who never considered themselves interested in art.
“I kind of hope that one thing ArtQuest does is when a teenager stops playing Gorilla Tag and starts thinking about what else they might do on a Quest, they might look at that and say, ‘Hey, I want to check out whatever that is.'”
Early in development, Mosinger recruited his parents, both in their seventies, to test the app.
“I experimented on my parents,” he laughed.
His father spent eight to ten hours inside ArtQuest working through the interface and pointing out anything that wasn’t intuitive. That feedback helped refine everything from seated play to movement controls.
As ArtQuest found its audience, older adults turned out to be one of its largest user groups, according to Mosinger. Today, the app is also being used by at least one library in France as part of an art appreciation program.
Multiplayer support lets families and friends tour galleries together, and Mosinger said some users regularly meet inside ArtQuest despite living hundreds of miles apart.
Asked what comes next, Mosinger said he’s more interested in helping people discover art than adding a virtual guide.
“The most commonly requested features involve navigation,” he said, pointing to search tools and better ways to surface related works. He’d also like to see museum curators eventually host live guided tours inside virtual galleries.
Munch and Monet, inside ArtQuest VR
Looking For The Holodeck
Eventually, our conversation drifted beyond ArtQuest. Mosinger reflected on some of VR’s early educational experiences, many of which are no longer available in their original form.
For him, VR has always represented something closer to Star Trek‘s Holodeck than another game console.
“I have always imagined VR as the Holodeck,” he said.
Inspiring Real Museum Visits
I told Mosinger that after spending time in the app, I found myself wanting to visit art museums more often.
He smiled.
“The very best thing that anybody could ever tell me about ArtQuest is that they used it and loved it and then they went to a real-world art museum,” he said.
“That is what I want more than anything else.”
ArtQuest VR is available on the Meta Quest store for $9.99. The new DLC collections are available separately for $4.99 each, or as a bundle for $7.99.
