The Dali Museum
The Endless Garden

IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE

Press

The Endless Garden is an immersive experience where audiences create their own surreal objects through a web application, contributing to a collective dreamscape. Inspired by Salvador Dalí’s unrealized concept of a Dream Garden—sketched but never painted—we bring his vision to life through historical research and AI tools.

This project invites participants to step into Dalí’s imagination and co-create a garden that never existed… until now. At the end of the experience, after forming a personal connection with their unique Dream Object, participants will discover bite-sized insights about the symbol in Dalí’s work that inspired it—uncovering its meaning and transforming this act of co-creation into a learning experience that sparks curiosity and a sense of wonder.

How it Works

  1. Scan & Enter the Dream Portal
    Visitors scan a QR code on the wall to open a mobile web app, where they answer three multiple-choice questions about a dream object inspired by Dalí’s visual world.

  2. Co-Create a Unique Dream Object
    Based on their answers, an AI system generates a one-of-a-kind dream object that appears in the immersive Endless Garden, joining all the other visitors’ creations in a shared digital landscape.

  3. Watch the Garden Come Alive
    Inside the projection-mapped environment, each dream object moves, reacts, and interacts with other objects—forming a living, ever-changing garden of collective imagination.

  4. Connect Back to Dalí’s Original Works
    Visitors can download and share their dream object, and tap “Learn More” to see which Dalí symbols and paintings inspired it—most of which are in the Dalí Museum collection downstairs, inviting them to find the original artwork in person and deepen their personal connection to Dalí’s world.

Impact &
Visitor Engagement

  1. High engagement and strong replay value
    On average, each visitor interacted with the experience 1.8 times, generating almost two Dream Objects per person. This indicates high user stickiness—visitors were genuinely stimulated by the co-creation process and eager to explore multiple outcomes.

  2. Strong personal connection & pride in creation
    54% of participants chose to download or share their Dream Object through the web application. This unusually high share rate shows that visitors felt a strong personal connection to their creation and were proud to associate themselves with the artwork.

  3. Curiosity successfully sparked
    31% of users clicked “Learn More” to read the bite-sized story behind their Dream Object’s Dalí-inspired symbolism. This demonstrates that the experience effectively triggered curiosity and encouraged deeper engagement with the museum’s collection.

Production Progress

Design Philosophy

At the core of our work is a simple question: what makes an experience meaningful for museum audiences? We believe a meaningful experience is one that teaches—about the world, about an artist, or about oneself—and one that creates a shared memory that visitors can carry into conversations with the people they came with. The Endless Garden was conceived from this perspective: how immersive, participatory storytelling can transform passive viewing into curiosity, reflection, and dialogue.

Our inspiration came from both art history and an unrealized moment within it. In the 1930s, Salvador Dalí and Alberto Giacometti were briefly involved in an unrealized collaborative commission—an encounter between surrealist symbolism and sculptural presence that never fully materialized. This historical “what if” became the conceptual seed for the exhibition. We imagined a co-created immersive garden built from Dalí’s symbolic language, where visitors could actively participate in extending his dream logic rather than merely observing it. Drawing from Dalí’s writings and recurring symbols, we distilled his visual universe into 30 symbolic dream objects, each rooted in his broader philosophical and psychological themes.

Our design intention was to create an experience that feels both personal and collective. Visitors begin by answering three short, lightweight questions inspired by Dalí’s dream logic, leading to the creation of a unique dream object that represents a specific Dalínian symbol. This object then joins a shared, immersive digital garden within a U-shaped gallery space. To preserve a sense of discovery and authorship, we designed an algorithmic system that ensures visitors within the same gallery do not receive or encounter duplicate dream objects, despite the limited total set of 30. This technical constraint required careful orchestration between interaction design, real-time systems, and spatial flow. More importantly, it allowed each visitor to feel a genuine sense of uniqueness and ownership over what they created. By establishing a personal emotional connection first, we then introduce bite-sized interpretive content—lightweight but meaningful explanations of each symbol’s historical, philosophical, and psychological significance—supporting deeper understanding without overwhelming the audience.

Credits

Creative Director & Art Director & Unreal Developer & AI Workflow Integration

Lois He

Technical Director & Project Manager

Vio Zhu

3D Artist & Animator

Yunhang Qin

Technical Artist & Animator

John Luo


Special Thanks

Beth Harrison, Hank Hine, Jeremy Beam, Christina Tang

Marlon Evans, Todd Bryant, Winslow Porter

Jon Fisher, Jack Jacober, Branden Figuero