Bringing together their expertise, IP Paris and Manzalab are reinventing the immersive museum experience
A public-private collaboration for cultural heritage
This partnership combines complementary skills:
- Manzalab contributes its immersive platform Teemew
- École Polytechnique and Télécom SudParis provide expertise in virtual reality, 3D modeling, gamification, and user experience.
- Supported by the SPIRAL interdisciplinary of IP Paris for the scientific part of the project
Led by immersive tech company Manzalab, the project brings together two schools from Institut Polytechnique de Paris: École Polytechnique and Télécom SudParis — alongside cultural institutions such as Mus’X, the Forum des Images, Château de Versailles, and the Domaine national de Chambord among others.
The goal is to empower museums to design and share rich, immersive cultural experiences accessible online. ICON also supports the next generation of engineers and researchers to create socially responsible digital worlds.
From Metaverse of Museums to ICON
ICON builds on the success of the 2023 Metaverse of Museums initiative.
The new phase focuses on enabling cultural institutions to collaborate in curating, designing, and sharing immersive content tailored to diverse audiences, both in France and internationally.
"With ICON, we aim at producing the ideal scientific museum, where visitors can manipulate scientific objects and concepts by themselves, something that is not easy to do in a physical museum” - Raphaël Granier de Cassagnac, Scientific Director of SPIRAL - interdisciplinary center.
Immersion, education, heritage — united at the forefront of innovation
The collaboration between Manzalab and IP Paris started in 2019 by conceiving a particle physics virtual classroom, for students to visit discovery places such as CERN.
More than 10 museums worked with Manzalabe and IP Paris to imagine the metaverse use cases for cultural dissemination, within the Metavers of Museums initiative.
Today, up to 90% of museum collections are hidden in storage and not displayed to the public, making digital worlds a powerful way to showcase rarely seen artifacts.
"Teemew was invented for virtual offices, and it was proved to be efficient for other use cases, such as education and formations. The partnership with museums and IP Paris allows us to reach the dissemination of the cultural and scientific heritage to the broadest possible audience" said Clément Merville, President of Manzalab.
Discover their vision in this article : If the metaverse were a real revolution, it would already have happened!
This collaboration redefines how we experience culture — proving that innovation thrives where disciplines converge.
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