Me + 1 other designer, 2 VR Devs
See full case study below
HackDartmouth hosted its annual 36-hour hackathon, themed “HackDartmouth VIII: Into The Multiverse.” The challenge: “hack into infinity.” Our team of four decided to take that literally. We set out to build a Virtual Reality experience with six unique explorable rooms, each representing a different “universe” that users could enter and interact with—all designed and developed in just 36 hours.
Creativity
How creative is their hack? Have you seen many ideas like this before or is this very unique?
Technical
Is their hack technically challenging? Have they shown their skills well, and shown how to effectively use tech to bring an idea to life?
Impact
Is their hack going to impact people's lives positively? Are they helping a particular community?
Design
How creative and engaging is the design of their hack?
How might we transport users into immersive multiverse experiences that feel magical — built in just 36 hours?
We built Perspectiverse—a VR game that invites users into a virtual museum where they can literally jump into different artworks. Within the experience, users can:
Explore each space for its immersive environment
Step inside their favorite art pieces to experience them up close
Compete in a VR scavenger hunt, racing friends to identify key art elements the fastest
In total, we created six immersive rooms: a waiting room and lobby where users could choose their own adventure, and five explorable universes modeled after seminal works of art history:
Every element in Perspectiverse was created from scratch by our team—no pre-made assets, no shortcuts. Each artwork was modeled and rendered in Maya, then integrated and deployed in Unity for the Meta Quest 3, where we showcased the experience live to users and judges at HackDartmouth.
Museums have long struggled with accessibility and engagement. For many, art can feel distant, intimidating, or static—a beautiful thing to look at, but not necessarily to experience. We asked ourselves: what if art could change as you engage with it?
"A painting lives only through the person who is looking at it"
– Pablo Picasso
Our team was especially inspired by the hackathon’s multiverse theme. We imagined a world where you could literally step into a painting—cross Monet’s bridge, sit inside Van Gogh’s bedroom, or chase Kandinsky’s abstract forms. By combining our love for art history (several of us had studied or been personally connected to artists) with our interest in VR and gaming, we saw an opportunity to reimagine museum engagement altogether.
📷 [Insert brainstorm sketches + sticky notes]
From Idea to Experience
Once we landed on the concept of jumping into artwork, the question became: how do we make it engaging and interconnected?
We experimented with ideas ranging from guided tours to free exploration, but ultimately decided that the most exciting approach was to create a linked scavenger hunt across paintings. This mechanic not only encouraged play, but also gave users new ways to notice details and patterns in art they might otherwise overlook.
What if you could walk across Monet's Bridge and discover hidden clues?
Selecting Artwork
HAVE SOMETHING IN HERE LISTING OUT EACH ART PEICE AND STUFF HERE INSTEAD OF IN SOLUTIONS OVERVIEW
2 DESIGNERS x 2 DEVELOPERS x 36 HOURS
With only 36 hours to build six VR universes, we knew every minute counted. One hour in, we committed to a no-sleep sprint and sketched out a high-level workplan that would keep us aligned from start to finish.
Scroll horizontally to see our full plan
Energy
Output
This structured sprint kept us focused while still leaving room for creative flourishes (frames, textures, gamification) and the human side of hackathons—snacks, laughs, and energy boosts.
Design – Buidling 80/20 for maximum impact, highest speed
With only 35 hours of working time left, we moved from planning into the actual design work. We faced a unique set of constraints:
Time constraints
Every hour mattered—we needed to design quickly, but leave buffer for testing and polish.
Aesthetic constraints
Each painting was instantly recognizable, meaning users would feel if something was off. Textures, proportions, and details had to capture the essence of each artist’s style.
Technical constraints
Unlike rendering with Arnold, porting to Unity meant no rounding or smoothing tools. Every model had to be built precisely with clean, intentional geometry.
WIP Rooms
Careful work planning and splitting the paintings allowed us to move fast and iterate efficiently. But designing VR spaces based on world-famous artworks wasn’t straightforward—it required reinterpreting flat planes, abstraction, and perspective tricks into explorable 3D environments.
Roy Lichtenstein: Rendering the 2D in 3D
For Interior with Restful Paintings, Lichtenstein’s flattened interior posed a direct challenge: how do you model depth in a painting that resists it?
I created the illusion of Lichtenstein’s graphic outlines by selecting faces in Maya and filling them black, applied radially so they appeared as thick drawn outlines. This preserved the comic-book style while still letting users explore it in VR.
Wassily Kandinsky: Making Abstraction Playable
Composition 8 is inherently abstract and conceptual, which made it difficult to translate into a navigable space. Instead of forcing realism, we leaned into our core value of play and delight.
We scaled Kandinsky’s floating shapes into interactive structures, turning abstraction into a VR playground. By embracing the strengths of the medium, we transformed conceptual geometry into an environment that felt both faithful and fun.
Through these creative problem-solving approaches, we ensured that each room felt immersive, recognizable, and delightful, while still staying true to the spirit of the original artworks.
With designs complete, we partnered with our developers to bring the multiverse into VR headsets. One of our first priorities was creating the right entry environment: a lobby that would ground users in the experience and provide a clear interaction plan for how they’d move between worlds.
📷 [Image of lobby + interaction plan sketch]
We then mapped ideal user paths through each artwork, ensuring that every room felt unique and interactive. For example, users could walk across Monet’s bridge, or navigate around abstract obstacles in Kandinsky’s balance-beam playground
Challenge: Framing the Artwork Without Losing Time
To create the “museum feel,” each painting needed a frame that looked detailed and ornate, befitting an art institution. But with only 36 hours, we couldn’t afford to model custom frames for every orientation and dimension.
Solution: Modular Frame System
The straight and horizontal pieces could fit together like this ^
We designed just two reusable frame components—a corner piece and a straight piece. Developers imported these into Unity, placed corners around each artwork, and stretched the middle sections lengthwise (without distortion) to fit different dimensions. This allowed us to:
Spend time perfecting one highly ornate frame design
Scale it across all six artworks with minimal effort
Preserve the polished, museum-quality aesthetic without sacrificing speed
Once the rooms were built, we began dry-running the VR experience ourselves. These internal playtests allowed us to refine the details—tweaking frame-pulling animations, adjusting lighting within each environment, and generally making the multiverse feel more alive.
The biggest breakthrough, however, was the incorporation of music. Adding sound transformed the experience from visually impressive to fully immersive, anchoring each room in a distinct sensory atmosphere.
Lobby: Eric Satie – Gymnopédie No. 1
Satie’s meditative piano lines set a tone of quiet introspection—a gentle entry point before the multiverse of paintings unfolds. The piece’s modal ambiguity and spare harmonies invite curiosity, echoing the role of the lobby as both threshold and orientation space.
Interior with Restful Paintings: Peggy Lee – Fever
Lee’s sultry, minimalist jazz reflects Lichtenstein’s Pop Art sensibility: an embrace of popular culture reframed as high art. The song’s stripped-down rhythm and cultural cachet mirror the painting’s flat planes and ironic play with domesticity, creating a dialogue between “low” entertainment and “elevated” aesthetic space.
Bedroom in Arles: Schubert – Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, D.960 (Andante sostenuto)
The slow, meditative second movement of Schubert’s final piano sonata carries a mood of introspection and fragility, shifting suddenly between calm lyricism and darker undercurrents. Written near the end of his life, the piece is often read as Schubert’s reflection on his own solitude and mortality. Its unsettled balance mirrors Van Gogh’s bedroom—an intimate space marked by restlessness beneath the surface.
The Water Lily Pond: Puccini – Nessun Dorma (Turandot, Act 3)
Puccini’s soaring aria evokes the suspension of time and space, mirroring Monet’s dissolving brushstrokes and reflective waters. The lyrical expansiveness and sustained climaxes parallel the meditative stillness of the pond, as if inviting viewers into Monet’s own garden reverie.
The Basket of Apples: André Rieu – La Petit Valse
The lively waltz rhythm captures the kinetic instability of Cézanne’s composition, where apples tilt and roll in deliberate defiance of perspective. The buoyant triple meter enlivens the still life, echoing Cézanne’s transformation of the ordinary into dynamic visual drama.
Composition 8: Mahler - Symphony No. 1
Mahler’s symphony, with its shifting tonalities, layered textures, and sudden contrasts, resonates with Kandinsky’s geometric abstraction and visual cacophony. The music’s polyphonic density and orchestral color align with Kandinsky’s attempt to make painting function like music: a total, immersive composition of sound and form.
Art History Tidbit:
Wassily Kandinsky believed deeply in the connection between music and painting, often describing his compositions as “visual symphonies.” Composition 8, one of the works we modeled, was directly inspired by the rhythms of music—a perfect match for the track we paired it with in Perspectiverse.
This final addition showed us just how sensitive VR is to multisensory design. By combining visuals, interaction, and sound, we created an environment that felt not just playable, but alive.
In the end, our team took first place at HackDartmouth VIII—beating out over X competing teams. The judges cited their excitement about our project’s multiverse concept and its potential applications in EdTech and museum engagement.
Our final demo video showcases the experience in just two minutes—highlighting the central lobby space, frame-pull animations, and scavenger hunt mechanics. We actually struggled to capture everything we had built in that short time (which is why the video feels a little rushed!)—a testament to the sheer volume of design and implementation we accomplished in 36 hours.
✅ Creativity
✅ Impact
✅ Technical
✅ Design
I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished—especially since this was my first time exporting and deploying my 3D models into a VR environment.
Key Learnings
📋 You can do more than you think in 36 hours
With strong work planning and time management, even an ambitious project becomes achievable.
🧘🏻♀️ Flexibility is essential (to create at speed and in VR)
You can’t get stuck perfecting small details when the big picture needs to move forward.
👓 Use the medium to your advantage
VR isn’t perfect, but its strength lies in being 3D, spatial, and immersive. Designing with those qualities in mind creates surprise and delight.
🎨 Everyone loves art, they just don’t always know it
Watching hackathon attendees light up as they explored the worlds we built was deeply rewarding. Many who “didn’t like museums” admitted they simply hadn’t found a way to engage on their terms. I’m proud we built toward a potential solution.
Most of all, this project reinforced the power of collaboration.
I couldn’t have asked for a better team, and I’m still close with them today (in fact, I was just with JuJu, Macy, and Benny at HK Lounge Bistro in SF a week and a half ago as I write this).
If any of y'all see this, so proud of the work we've done <3