New realities require novel spatial solutions. A multi-year collaboration designing the architecture for one of the first permanent virtual reality art museums.
The Museum of Other Realities (MOR) is a social VR platform that houses artworks from VR artists around the world. Between 2017 and 2019, Samuel designed the museum’s architectural spaces: galleries, corridors, transitional zones, and the grand entrance hall. The system is modular, designed to grow as the collection expanded.
The project began in 2017, when Samuel connected with the MOR founders while looking for VR artists to bring into the CULTVRAL gallery. He gave them a tour of CULTVRAL and sent them the geometry of the Light Museum to try in VR. From there, he joined the private beta events at the museum (then called “TH-er”), surrounded by VR artists from around the world. Over the following years, the collaboration deepened into a full architectural commission.
The spaces were conceived through conversations, sketches, parametric models, and hand sculpture in VR, a hybrid process that merged architectural precision with sculptural expression.
Simple parametric rooms, floors, stairs, and illuminated surfaces provided the structural logic. The grand hall was then separated into two twirling masses, sculpted entirely by hand in VR. The rigour of architecture merged with the expressive freedom of sculpture.
In order to obtain a modular system of expandable rooms, the design process followed an unconventional order to allow for flexible modularity. First came the connections between rooms and corridors, then the rooms themselves. This provided a good arsenal of design solutions for the museum to weave spaces together as it grew, with each new gallery integrated into the existing circulation without disrupting the experience.
Each gallery room is visually isolated from the others, allowing extraordinarily complex artworks to coexist within the larger architecture. The constraints of virtual space shape form as fundamentally as gravity shapes physical buildings.
New realities require novel spatial solutions. In virtual architecture, technology shapes form as fundamentally as gravity shapes physical buildings.
The grand entrance hall was the most ambitious element of the design. Samuel wanted something dramatic and sculptural, a space that would announce the museum’s ambition from the moment of arrival.
The hall was sculpted entirely by hand in VR, then merged with the parametric floor plans and structural elements. The result is a space that feels both architectural and geological, as if the museum were carved from the earth rather than built upon it.
The Museum of Other Realities continues to operate as a social VR platform, hosting rotating exhibitions of VR art from artists around the world. The architecture functions as a curated sequence of spaces, each room producing its own quality of light, scale, and atmosphere, complementing and amplifying the art within.
The project represents a critical step in Samuel’s practice: the moment when the constraints and possibilities of virtual space became his primary design material.