Metasteps' design team are clearly very skilled and the staff are very helpful and supportive.
"If you are wanting a VR experience for an exhibition space, Metasteps is the top choice."
How a rural national park opened its gallery to people who will never make the drive to Danby.
THE CHALLENGE
A gallery worth the journey, if you can make the journey
The North York Moors National Park Authority employs 165 people and runs the Inspired by… gallery at Danby Lodge National Park Centre, showing work by artists who live in the park and take their subject from it. The gallery is a recognised exhibition venue with its own programme.
Its problem is its location. The gallery sits in the middle of a rural national park, which is why most people never see the art in it.
Additionally, conservation work is difficult to communicate through reports, and art and photography do it better. A virtual gallery was conceived as part of a wider digital arts project, a way to remove the access barrier and to put the conservation story in front of an audience the physical building could never reach.
The team was new to digital and to VR. Nobody in the organisation had built anything like this before.
THE SOLUTION
Building 3D from 2D photographs
The Authority found Metasteps on Google, then decided on it by reading the customer stories on the site. Two things settled it: the platform's specialisation in gallery spaces rather than generic 3D rooms, and the staff, who were helpful from first contact.
The build itself is the part that surprised them. The design team recreated the gallery from supplied images, without anyone from Metasteps visiting Danby, and the result was accurate to the room. For an organisation with no prior digital experience, the work happened without a learning curve.
Placing images and text was straightforward, and the support, the fact that someone kept answering after the build was handed over, is the thing the team singles out as invaluable.
THE RESULT
A gallery that is no longer constrained by its physical location
Since September 2025, the Inspired by… gallery can be walked through from anywhere, navigated with a mouse or a touchscreen, with work displayed as it is in the room.
The first virtual exhibition introduced artists living and working in the park, among them the glassmakers Gillies Jones, the painter Peter Hicks, the sculptor Emma Stothard and the textile designer Lindsey Tyson. It was covered by regional press as part of the Authority's wider push into digital arts, alongside making park trails and installations available through the Bloomberg Connects app.
For a national park authority, that changes who the gallery is for. The artists reach people who were never going to drive to Danby, and the conservation work the exhibition carries reaches an audience that would not have read about it.
The Authority went into this with no digital experience and came out with a gallery it did not have to learn to build, and support that stayed available after handover. And all this with the internal cost of the project being a set of photographs and a brief.
North York Moors' Space
Visit the space for yourself and see what Metasteps' platform is capable of.
Visit the spaceYour venue, open to everyone, even those who cannot get there.
Send us photographs of the room and we will rebuild it in 3D, or start a trial and do it yourself.