National Gallery of Prague Lets Blind Visitors Touch the Untouchable
Touching Masterpieces is a 2018 digital campaign created by Geometry Global for the National Gallery of Prague in Czechia, using NeuroDigital's Avatar VR haptic glove technology to allow blind and visually impaired visitors to physically sense the form and texture of iconic sculptures — including Michelangelo's David, the Venus de Milo, and the bust of Nefertiti — without placing a single hand on a physical artwork.
The campaign activation took place over two days, on March 23 and 24, 2018, at the National Gallery of Prague, as documented by museumnext.com and shots.net. Geometry Prague, the local arm of Geometry Global, designed the experience in partnership with haptic technology firm NeuroDigital and the Leontinka Foundation, a Czechia-based organisation supporting blind and visually impaired people. The Leontinka Foundation's involvement ensured that the accessibility dimension of the project was grounded in genuine community need rather than conceptual gesture.
The mechanics of the experience centred on NeuroDigital's Avatar VR gloves, which use vibration and tactile feedback to translate the contours, surfaces, and volumes of virtual three-dimensional sculptures into physical sensation. Participants wearing the gloves could move their hands through a virtual rendering of each artwork and receive real-time haptic responses corresponding to the sculpture's form, according to museumnext.com. The experience was documented for broader publication in archive records in June 2018, as noted by clapboard.com. In Czechia, where the campaign originated, the physical exhibition reached 210 blind visitors directly over its two-day run, per warc.com, while its media reach extended far beyond the Central European market. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100, reflecting strong creative and strategic execution relative to its category.
Accessibility drives the core strategic logic of Touching Masterpieces. Museums globally face a structural tension between preservation mandates — which prohibit touching artworks — and the aspiration to serve all audiences equitably, including those for whom visual perception is unavailable. In Czechia, as across Europe, institutions housing significant cultural heritage collections have faced growing pressure to demonstrate inclusive programming, and the National Gallery of Prague's collaboration with the Leontinka Foundation positioned this campaign as a direct institutional response to that pressure.
The strategic choice of haptic technology, rather than audio description or tactile replica — approaches already employed by institutions such as the British Museum in London and the Museo del Prado in Madrid — gave Geometry Global a meaningfully differentiated platform. Where traditional accessibility solutions offer approximations, the Avatar VR glove system developed by NeuroDigital aimed to replicate the phenomenological experience of touch across a virtual surface, according to museumnext.com. This distinction between simulation and substitution sits at the centre of the campaign's creative and ethical proposition.
The travel and leisure sector's museum segment was operating in a competitive global environment in 2018. According to attractionsmanagement.com, the top twenty global museums collectively attracted 108.1 million visits in 2018, a year-over-year increase of 0.1 percent. The Louvre in Paris led that ranking with 10.2 million visitors, according to attractionsmanagement.com, illustrating the scale differential between internationally dominant institutions and national galleries serving regional markets such as Czechia. Against that backdrop, Geometry Global's strategy for the National Gallery of Prague was not to compete on visitor volume but to claim a distinctive position in the global conversation about cultural access — a position that a two-day physical activation in Prague could sustain through earned international media coverage.
Julia Dovlatova served as Creative Director at Geometry Prague for Touching Masterpieces, leading a team whose creative challenge was to make an invisible sense — touch — the primary medium of a museum campaign, as documented by clapboard.com and goldendrum.com. The creative execution rested almost entirely on the integrity of the haptic technology itself: if the tactile feedback delivered by NeuroDigital's Avatar VR gloves failed to correspond convincingly to the sculptures' surfaces, the campaign's emotional and communicative premise would collapse. The production team's decision to render Michelangelo's David, the Venus de Milo, and the bust of Nefertiti — three of the most recognisable sculptural forms in Western cultural heritage — was deliberate, grounding the experience in works whose reputations preceded them and whose physical inaccessibility to blind audiences was culturally legible.
Carlos Baer held the role of Senior Creative and Art Director on the project, with Andrei Didyk serving as Art Director and Kai Granaas as Copywriter, per clapboard.com and goldendrum.com. Howard Smiedt acted as Chief Creative Officer for EMEA at Geometry Global, providing senior creative oversight across the campaign's development. The production dimension was managed by Vendula Malochová as Production Manager, with account leadership from Jan Dvorak as Account Director and Tereza Balasová as Account Executive, according to goldendrum.com. Lluis Rotger served as Associate Creative Director, while Martin Pesta held the role of Managing Director and Iva Welker served as Client Service Director, per warc.com and goldendrum.com.
The content and communications layer, managed by Anna Eliasová as Content Manager and Miroslav Popel as PR Manager, was central to translating a two-day physical activation in Czechia into a sustained global media story. Public coverage appeared on March 27 and 28, 2018, according to museumnext.com and shots.net, demonstrating that the campaign's communications architecture was designed to amplify beyond the exhibition floor from the moment the physical experience closed.
No verified commercial performance data for Touching Masterpieces is publicly available in the form of attendance conversion metrics or institutional revenue figures. The campaign's documented impact operates across three distinct registers: direct audience reach, earned media reach, and awards recognition.
The physical activation in Czechia was experienced by 210 blind visitors across its two-day run at the National Gallery of Prague in March 2018, per warc.com. That figure, modest by the standards of large-scale museum programming, was always secondary to the campaign's media architecture. According to warc.com, Touching Masterpieces reached 544 million people across 172 countries through earned media coverage — a ratio of global reach to local footprint that reflects the campaign's structural design as a communications proposition built around a demonstration event rather than a conventional exhibition.
The awards record substantiates the campaign's creative and strategic credibility. Touching Masterpieces won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2018 in the Health and Wellness — Use of Technology category, as reported by shots.net. At Golden Drum 2018, the campaign won the Grand Prix, recorded under entry code E59003GD18, according to goldendrum.com. Warc.com records a Gold award at the WARC Awards, confirming recognition across multiple independent international juries.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness derives from the precision of its insight-to-mechanic relationship: the barrier it identified — that blind people cannot touch museum artworks — was addressed by a technology that does exactly and only that one thing. That formal economy, combined with a communications strategy that let the experience speak for itself through earned coverage, accounts for its disproportionate global footprint relative to its two-day physical duration in Czechia.
Touching Masterpieces is a 2018 accessibility campaign created by Geometry Global for the National Gallery of Prague in Czechia. It used NeuroDigital's Avatar VR haptic gloves to let blind and visually impaired visitors physically sense the surfaces of iconic sculptures, including Michelangelo's David and the Venus de Milo, without touching the original artworks.
Geometry Global used NeuroDigital's Avatar VR haptic gloves. The gloves deliver vibration and tactile feedback that corresponds to the contours and surfaces of virtual three-dimensional sculptures, allowing users to perceive form through touch, according to museumnext.com. This distinguished the campaign from conventional tactile replica or audio-description accessibility approaches used by other institutions.
Touching Masterpieces won a Bronze Lion at Cannes Lions 2018 in the Health and Wellness — Use of Technology category, as reported by shots.net. The campaign also won the Grand Prix at Golden Drum 2018, per goldendrum.com, and a Gold award at the WARC Awards, according to warc.com, confirming recognition across three major international juries.
Touching Masterpieces reached 544 million people across 172 countries through earned media, according to warc.com. The physical activation in Czechia was experienced by 210 blind visitors over two days at the National Gallery of Prague in March 2018. The campaign's communications design was built to amplify a short local event into sustained global media coverage.
Julia Dovlatova served as Creative Director at Geometry Prague for Touching Masterpieces, as documented by clapboard.com and goldendrum.com. The broader creative team included Lluis Rotger as Associate Creative Director, Carlos Baer as Senior Creative and Art Director, Andrei Didyk as Art Director, and Kai Granaas as Copywriter, with Howard Smiedt as Chief Creative Officer EMEA.
The National Gallery of Prague partnered with Geometry Global as the lead agency, NeuroDigital as the haptic technology provider, and the Leontinka Foundation, a Czechia-based organisation supporting blind and visually impaired people, as the accessibility partner, according to museumnext.com and goldendrum.com. The Leontinka Foundation's involvement grounded the project in direct community need.
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