Dreams Of Dali
Dreams of Dalí
Step inside a Salvador Dalí painting. Walk through the vast dreamscape of his 1935 work, navigating via gaze-activated orbs between towers, distant vistas, and hidden surprises. A landmark of museum VR, created by The Dalí Museum in partnership with an award-winning agency, and available free on Steam.
Webby People's Voice Award
Dreams of Dalí is a virtual reality experience produced by The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and created by advertising and design agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco. Commissioned in collaboration with production studio Half Full Nelson, it premiered as a museum installation in January 2016 before becoming available on Steam in 2018. The experience remains free on Steam and the Oculus platform.
The subject is Dalí's 1935 painting "Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet's 'Angelus'" — a surrealist meditation on Jean-François Millet's famous 1859 realist painting of two peasants pausing in prayer, reimagined through Dalí's characteristic transformation of recognisable forms into monumental, uncanny, and psychologically charged presences. The VR experience translates the painted landscape into a three-dimensional space that users can enter and navigate, taking those familiar elements and rendering them at an awe-inducing environmental scale.
Navigation through the three-dimensional landscape is accomplished through a gaze-based orb system: small glowing spheres are positioned at key vantage points throughout the environment, and looking at one triggers a jump to that position. This is not free locomotion — there is no walking or smooth movement. Instead, the experience offers a curated set of perspectives through the landscape, each revealing a new angle on the architecture, the creatures, or the distant horizon.
The environment combines the painted landscape with three-dimensional model realisations of elements from the work, ambient sound design, and some interactive surprises the Dalí Museum describes as things to discover "around every corner." A 360° video version of the experience also exists for non-headset devices including smartphones, tablets, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, and Daydream, making parts of the experience accessible to students without PC VR hardware — though the 360° video version is a significantly reduced encounter compared to the full headset experience.
- Free on Steam — no cost for school deployment
- Cannes Cyber Lion GOLD • Webby People's Voice • Facebook Silver Innovation
- 86% Steam positive (Very Positive) • 152 reviews
- Produced directly by The Dalí Museum — authoritative source
- VR scale makes Surrealist spatial distortion physically legible
- Education licensing available (VRlicense@thedali.org)
- 360° video version for students without PC VR headsets
- Pairs naturally with Millet's "Angelus" for comparative art lesson
- PC VR only — not available on standalone Meta Quest
- Short (~15 minutes) — needs pre/post lesson framing to fill a period
- Gaze-orb navigation only — no free locomotion or student agency
- Experience best for Dalí enthusiasts — may feel alienating without context
- Released 2016/2018 — visual fidelity reflects that era
- Creator
- Goodby Silverstein & Partners (for The Dalí Museum)
- Price
- Free (Steam)
- Released
- Museum: Jan 2016 • Steam: 2018
- Platform
- Steam (PC VR) • Rift • Vive • Index • WMR
- Standalone Quest
- Not supported
- Duration
- ~15 minutes
- Navigation
- Gaze-orbs (no free locomotion)
- Steam rating
- 86% positive • Very Positive (152)
- Awards
- Cannes Cyber Lion GOLD • Webby People's Voice
- Education licensing
- VRlicense@thedali.org
