Mixed Reality, digital art and new immersive languages
On June 23 and 24, 2026, Metagate took part in The New Atlas of Digital Art 2026: Culture Dome, the international event promoted by MEET Digital Culture Center and dedicated to emerging forms of immersion, digital culture and contemporary artistic production.
As part of the MEET Village, the ground floor of MEET was transformed into an experimental space open to the public, where Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality and XR were explored as new expressive languages.
Within this context, Metagate curated three Mixed Reality experiences for Meta Quest 3: The School of Athens, Heliobioma and CLAVIS / Mystery in the Convent, developed for the Diocesan Museum of Brescia. Alongside these experiences, Metagate also presented the call to action for Reality Perceptions, the new open call dedicated to university creativity in Mixed Reality in collaboration with @co_meta_.
Three projects with different languages, aesthetics and objectives, but united by the same direction: using Mixed Reality to expand physical space without replacing it, making visible the content, relationships and narratives that normally remain hidden.
Mixed Reality at the MEET Village: when digital content enters physical space
The Culture Dome theme focused on a transformation that has now become clear: immersive technologies are no longer merely technical tools, but new cultural environments. They redefine the relationship between audiences, spaces, artworks, narratives and participation.
Mixed Reality, in particular, makes it possible to maintain contact with the real environment while enriching it with digital objects, interactions, avatars, audiovisual content and narrative layers. Unlike Virtual Reality, which transports users into a simulated world, Mixed Reality operates within the existing space: it expands it, interprets it and makes it interactive.
For Metagate, the MEET Village was the ideal setting to demonstrate how this technology can become a true cultural language, applicable to digital art, museums, live performance and creative education.
The School of Athens: a thinking machine between art, philosophy and AI
Among the experiences presented, The School of Athens found at MEET an environment particularly well suited to its aesthetic and conceptual nature.
The work, developed by Metagate through a collaboration between The CommonPoint and TAUMA, reinterprets the imagery of the School of Athens as a twenty-first-century thinking machine: a neural network inhabited by robotic figures, the robo-philosophers, reflecting on a radical and still unresolved question: what is consciousness? Is it exclusively human, or can it also emerge in machines?
In Mixed Reality, the audience no longer observes the artwork from the outside. They physically enter it.
During the first phase, visitors help the data collector statues connect cables to the real world, allowing them to gather data from the surrounding environment. During the second phase, they can interact with various artificial intelligences that respond as philosophers from the School of Athens, assimilated during the data collection process. As they reflect on consciousness, these entities progressively transform, acquiring clothing and an increasingly defined presence.
The experience thus becomes both a physical and mental journey: an immersive reflection on the relationship between classical art, artificial intelligence, philosophy and algorithmic imagination.
Link to the video.
The strength of The School of Athens emerged precisely from its ability to combine aesthetics with intellectual depth. It was not merely a visually powerful experience, but a space for exploring thought, consciousness and the possibility that machines could become not only tools, but symbolic interlocutors within contemporary culture.
CLAVIS / Mystery in the Convent: cultural heritage becomes a multiplayer experience
With CLAVIS / Mystery in the Convent, Metagate presented at the MEET Village a major project for the development of Mixed Reality applied to cultural heritage.
The experience, developed for Meta Quest 3 and created inside the Diocesan Museum of Brescia, guides visitors through the former monastery that now houses the museum. The experience takes place inside the former refectory, now known as the Mons. Bruno Foresti Hall, where the real environment is enriched with digital scenarios, interactive objects and narrative elements overlaid onto the physical space.
CLAVIS was presented as the first multiplayer Mixed Reality experience in Italy. This is not merely a technical feature. It changes the way visitors experience the museum.
Participants are not isolated inside individual content experiences, but share the same physical and digital space. They can move together, collaborate, solve puzzles and follow the story of a young friar uncovering the truth about his origins.
During the event, the project was also presented in the MEET theatre by Mauro Salvatore, Director of the Diocesan Museum of Brescia Foundation, and by Maddalena Rosa, Cultural Operator. Their participation placed the experience within a broader framework: not only technological innovation, but also the enhancement of cultural heritage, the accessibility of Italian museums and new forms of connection between audiences and places of memory.
CLAVIS demonstrates a concrete direction for museums, foundations and cultural institutions: transforming heritage into an experiential, relational and interactive space, while preserving its connection with the history, architecture and identity of each location.
Heliobioma: plants, solar data and live audiovisual performance
The third experience, developed in collaboration with Liveplanting and Solar Synth, was Heliobioma, which brought a performative, sensory and biological dimension to the MEET Village.
Developed by Metagate in collaboration with a group of students from the Politecnico di Milano, winners of the Music Tech Competition at Casa Sanremo Invest 2026, Heliobioma expands the projects presented during the competition through Mixed Reality, translating plants’ bioelectrical signals and cosmic data into sounds, images and digital visualisations.
The work combines Biodata Sonification with real-time solar wind data provided by the NOAA, creating an audiovisual ecosystem in which performers, plants, solar data and the audience participate in the same perceptual environment.
Through the headset, viewers enter a space where digital content is not decorative, but instead becomes a visual and auditory translation of invisible phenomena. Mixed Reality becomes a means of hearing and seeing what normally lies beyond direct human perception.
Heliobioma proved particularly effective in its live format: technically solid, visually compelling and capable of conveying the connection between biological organisms, cosmic data and human presence.
The experience made a highly contemporary question tangible: how can we listen to what we are normally unable to perceive?
Reality Perceptions: an open call for university creativity in Mixed Reality
Alongside the three experiences, Metagate also brought the call to action for Reality Perceptions to MEET, an open call inviting students to imagine new Mixed Reality project ideas.
The winners were:
1st Marionette 3.0
The Colla Theatre archive (APICE-Unimi) comes to life in Mixed Reality. Within the physical space, users manipulate historical 3D assets, including puppets and stage sets, and interact with a virtual guide, co-creating the scene and learning the art of puppetry through a combination of gamification and culture.
The Marionette 3.0 team, part of PNRR CHANGES and the University of Milan, worked with Professor Francesco Tissoni and with the support of Vincenzo Pernice. We combine culture and technology: Francesco Laezza, a web designer focused on VR and AR languages; Alessia Musa, a digital
artist working across 3D modelling and creative coding for XR; Enea Lorenzoni, an XR and game design specialist dedicated to enhancing historical archives.
2nd Whisper Vault by Alessandro Covini
Whisper Vault is an MR experience in which users must unlock a real chest by recovering the combination from the digital world. By following localised echoes through spatial audio, they discover ghosts that appear only at close range, each guarding one digit of the combination.
The initiative was developed in connection with the Culture Dome theme and invites young creatives, designers, digital artists and students working in visual arts, interaction design, 3D, CGI, game art and hybrid practices to examine how digital content can enter physical space, modifying it, animating it or transforming its perception.
Reality Perceptions represents a strategic direction for Metagate: moving beyond the development of immersive experiences to build a bridge between technology, education and new forms of cultural production.
Mixed Reality thus becomes an open tool, capable of bringing together different creative visions and placing them inside usable, shared and accessible environments through Meta Quest 3.
A living atlas of Mixed Reality
Metagate’s participation in the MEET Village confirmed the maturity of Mixed Reality as a cultural language and a new medium.
The School of Athens demonstrated the possibility of physically entering a conceptual and philosophical artwork, transforming thought into an explorable space.
CLAVIS / Mystery in the Convent demonstrated how cultural heritage can become a shared, narrative and multiplayer experience, opening new possibilities for museums and historical locations.
Heliobioma transformed biological and solar data into a living audiovisual environment capable of connecting nature, technology and performance.
Three different experiences, three ways of using Mixed Reality not as a special effect, but as an expressive grammar.
For Metagate, the MEET Village represented an important milestone: a place where technology, art and culture did not merely coexist, but began to speak the same language.
Once again, our thanks go to Maria Grazia Mattei and the entire MEET team for their support and for this opportunity!
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