The Met Unframed: Verizon rebuilt the closed Metropolitan Museum as a 5G virtual gallery

By January 2021, New York's museums had been operating under Covid restrictions for nearly a year — open only with staggered entry and sharply limited capacity, and many art lovers simply stayed away. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest art museum in the US, and its connectivity partner Verizon used the closure window to launch The Met Unframed, an immersive virtual art experience billed as a new chapter in the museum's 150-year history.

Built by multi-disciplinary production company Unit9 with the Met's own curatorial and digital teams, the experience digitally reconstructed iconic spaces — the Great Hall, the Temple of Dendur and more than a dozen galleries — and rendered nearly 50 works across the collection, from Rembrandt and Van Gogh to Jackson Pollock, El Anatsui, Carmen Herrera and Margareta Haverman.

The interaction model was closer to a game than a tour: visitors moved through the rendered galleries, and quiz games and puzzles unlocked augmented-reality versions of artworks, which could be placed and viewed in the visitor's own surroundings through their phone camera. Verizon's chief creative officer Andrew McKechnie framed it as digital inclusivity — access and education for people who could not walk the Fifth Avenue halls — and Met director Max Hollein described it as connecting people to art and to each other during months of social isolation.

The experience ran free for five weeks at themetunframed.com. It worked on 4G devices as well as 5G, avoiding the trap of becoming a carrier-only showcase, and was shortlisted at D&AD 2021 in Digital Experience Design.

Reopen the museum as a 5G showroom, one artwork AR-unlocked at a time

The closure was the insight: instead of recreating a visit nobody could make, Verizon and the Met built the visit people actually wanted — one that worked from the sofa, with no timed ticket.

Games that unlock AR artworks gave each piece a cost of attention, converting a branding surface into several minutes of interactive dwell time per visitor.

Web-first delivery (no app download) and 4G compatibility removed the two friction points that usually kill virtual experiences at scale.

For Verizon, 5G was demonstrated through what it renders rather than a speed chart — the invisible layer of a cultural experience, the credible way for a telecom to show up in the arts.

Unit9's photoreal scans of the Great Hall and Dendur made the experience worth sharing, giving press a visual story rather than a press release.

A tech sponsor lands harder when its demo solves the audience's real problem: Verizon proved 5G, art lovers got access. Games that unlock the art buy dwell time tours never earn.

The Met Unframed ran for five weeks from late January 2021 and closed as museums reopened, but it reset the bar for museum digital access — museum-sector publications treated it as a case study in 5G-era cultural experience, and D&AD shortlisted it in Digital Experience Design in 2021. The Met and Verizon continued working together on follow-on AR projects, and the experience's game-unlocks-art model became a reference point for museums experimenting with virtual and augmented access during and after the pandemic.