Rijksmuseum from home

Our new 360 degree interactive, made in just six days, takes you virtually past the most famous masterpieces in the Gallery of Honour, now that the Rijksmuseum can temporarily not be visited.

What if you had the Rijksmuseum all to yourself? You could enjoy Vermeer's Milkmaid in peace. And have extensive time to discover all the details of Rembrandt's Night Watch.

Now that the Rijks, like all museums, is closed due to the coronavirus, it is bringing its masterpieces into your living room. With Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close you get the feeling that you walk through the abandoned museum exploring the stories behind the artworks in peace. A specially developed 360 degree version of the Gallery of Honour takes you past eighteen paintings that are explained with text and audio fragments. During the online tour, you can zoom in to the smallest details of art treasures such as the Night Watch, The Milkmaid and Marten & Oopjen. Everything from home!

The new interactive is a collaboration of Q42 with the Rijksmuseum and design agency Fabrique. In just six days, we took new 360 degree photos for the online multimedia tour, made a navigation structure and aggregated the existing content from, among others, the museum app.

The very short production period in March 2020 was possible thanks to Micrio, our own ultra-resolution storytelling tool. With this technology we make it possible to smoothly display very large images and 360 degree footage. Combined with background information, voice-overs and music, this creates a magical interactive experience.

Micrio is ideal for museums that want to offer visitors a rich experience at home, as we have already shown with the award-winning web documentaries about Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights and Rembrandt's Night Watch. We have included the latter interactive in the new 360 degree experience. This means that there are many extra stories available in Rijksmuseum Masterpieces Up Close about the most famous painting in the Netherlands.

In the first two months after the launch, the interactive was visited no less than half a million times. And many people stay in the digital Gallery of Honour for fifteen minutes to half an hour.

At the end of 2020, the virtual tour of the Rijksmuseum won the jury prize and the people's prize at the Lovie Awards, the most prestigious award within the European internet community, in the 'Websites: Cultural Institutions' category. And in 2021 the website won bronze at the European Design Awards.

Go to rijksmuseum.nl and wander in peace along all the masterpieces in the Gallery of Honour!