Immersive Museum Experience with Savannah African Art Museum

African cultural heritage exists largely in physical spaces — museum shelves and academic archives — out of reach for the generation growing up on digital platforms. Traditional museum experiences struggle to engage younger audiences who learn through interaction, not observation. The design challenge: how do you make a 3,000-year-old artifact feel urgently relevant to a 15-year-old on Fortnite or a student exploring VR, without stripping away its cultural accuracy or dignity?

In collaboration with the Savannah African Art Museum, both experiences were built from primary sources — not stock assets. The narrative was grounded through a real interview with a descendant of Princess Yennenga of the Mossi Tribe. I led the 3D artifact pipeline: physically scanning museum objects, sculpting faithful digital counterparts in ZBrush, and texturing them in Substance 3D Painter. Every in-game object is a traceable replica of a real museum piece, with descriptions reviewed and approved by a museum curator. Gems of Africa extended this pipeline into VR and mobile, making the same collection accessible across platforms.

Afroverse is a single-player Fortnite adventure structured around 5 quests — Initiation, Fertility, Agriculture, Ancestors, and Royalty — each anchored to a specific artifact and its cultural meaning.

· Collect & Learn: players unlock curator-verified artifact descriptions mid-quest, embedding education into the reward loop. · Oral Tradition NPC: the Poro Bird mirrors how knowledge is passed in African oral cultures — players must converse with it to progress. · Sankofa Teleportal: named after the Akan symbol meaning 'go back and retrieve it,' it transports players to a dedicated in-game museum.

Gems of Africa is a VR/mobile experience across four thematic excavation zones.

· Dig & Discover: players unearth digital gemstones tied to real artifacts, reinforcing inquiry-based learning. · NPC Docents: virtual guides modeled on real museum staff deliver cultural context in-world. · Cross-platform access: supports both VR headsets and mobile, extending museum education to remote learners and classrooms globally.

Shipped two fully playable experiences co-produced with a real cultural institution — one on Fortnite (Island Code: 8872-3404-1747), one on Meta Horizon Worlds. By anchoring every gameplay moment to a 3D-scanned, curator-verified artifact, the projects demonstrate that edutainment doesn't require a compromise between accuracy and engagement. Together they establish a replicable pipeline — scan, sculpt, texture, contextualize, deploy — for bringing museum collections into interactive game engines across platforms.