Project Type
Architainment/Immersive Experience. A 70-minute immersive experience created in the context of the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death in 2026, produced by Mediapro Xperiences.
Project Name
Gaudí Code, The Untold Experience
Developed in collaboration with the Sagrada Família and the key Gaudí houses and institutions, the production was completed in May 2026, followed by its world premiere in Barcelona.
The complete narrative journey was curated and commissioned with Galdric Santana, President of the Gaudí Chair at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), with academic collaboration from the University of Barcelona.
For the first time, the experience brings together Gaudí’s built and unbuilt works within a single narrative, revealing the creative “code” behind his ideas and demonstrating that his work was not the result of chaos or improvisation, but of a rigorous and highly structured creative process.
Created for all audiences, including families, Gaudí Code offers an accessible and engaging way to discover Gaudí’s work and creative universe. It was conceived from the outset as an international touring production that will travel to cities around the world.
(GAUDI CODE)
Design Criteria
The design brief was to reveal Gaudí’s creative process by making visitors part of it, while using technology in a way that felt natural and almost invisible.
Gaudí made extensive use of the technologies of his time and constantly experimented with tools and techniques to develop his ideas. For this reason, technology became one of the pillars of the experience, but never its subject. This led us to combine a wide range of formats and technologies, including virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, projection, stereoscopy, visual content, lighting and sound, always in service of the story and the visitor experience.
The creative team was asked to create a journey through distinct environments, translate historical material into a contemporary visual language, and make Gaudí’s universe accessible and engaging for everyone, including families.
Another key ambition was to create a new and innovative experiential format that would make visitors feel part of Gaudí’s creativity. This led to the Gaudí Mixed Reality Workshop, designed to immerse visitors in his way of thinking, experimenting and creating.
Finally, the exhibition had to be conceived as a modular touring experience, able to travel internationally as a complete journey or in separate sections, with each part retaining its meaning and identity.
Project Description
Gaudí Code is a 70-minute journey through a sequence of distinct environments: an opening manifesto, the historical context of Gaudí’s time, the tools and techniques he used, the Gaudí Mixed Reality Workshop, an immersive film inspired by the four elements of nature, and finally the reveal of his unbuilt projects.
The most iconic part of the experience is the Gaudí Mixed Reality Workshop, a free-roam environment that combines physical scenography with a precisely aligned digital layer. Visitors can move through a reconstruction of Gaudí’s workshop, touch real objects and materials, and interact with digital content that brings his experiments and creative methods to life.
The immersive film then explores the four elements of nature through Gaudí’s major built works, using image, sound and space to connect his architecture with its natural inspiration.
The final section is dedicated to projects that Gaudí imagined but never had the opportunity to build. Through VR, visitors can enter these unrealized works for the first time, including the Hotel Attraction in New York, the Missions of Tangier and the monumental fountain for Plaça Catalunya.
Challenges and Solutions
One of the main challenges was to create an experience that could engage all audiences without compromising depth. The solution was to design the content in layers, allowing visitors to enjoy the exhibition intuitively while offering deeper levels of information for those who wanted to explore further.
A major design challenge was the Gaudí Mixed Reality Workshop: creating an experience that felt intuitive and easy to use, while making visitors feel genuinely present inside Gaudí’s workshop. The technology had to disappear as much as possible, rather than becoming visible or distracting.
This led to one of the project’s most innovative design solutions: combining physical scenography with free-roam mixed reality, while concealing tracking elements and technical components within the set itself. Wooden furniture, objects and workshop elements were used to conceal and integrate the technology, creating a seamless experience in which visitors can move naturally between the physical and digital worlds.
Another key challenge was making complex historical and academic material entertaining while preserving its rigor, particularly in the first immersive reconstruction of architectural projects imagined by Gaudí but never built. Bringing these spaces to life required a careful balance between interpretation, research and visual storytelling.
Finally, the project required bringing together, for the first time, the different institutions connected to Gaudí’s legacy around a single experience. This involved two years of coordination, agreements and continuous collaboration, keeping each institution closely involved and sharing the project’s progress throughout its development.
Equipment
The core technology behind the Gaudí Mixed Reality Workshop is Future Agora, our proprietary framework built on Unity 6, designed to manage large-scale multi-user immersive experiences. It synchronizes up to 40 PICO 4 Ultra Enterprise headsets in real time, managing user positions, interactions and station states across approximately 200 m².
For spatial alignment, the system combines PICO Shared Spatial Anchors with a secondary visual recognition layer using Unity Inference Engine / Sentis. The experience uses hand tracking instead of controllers, together with a custom push-and-turn interaction system, making interaction intuitive while keeping the technology as invisible as possible.
For the final VR experience, Gaussian Splatting is used to recreate Gaudí’s unrealized projects in a visual language between photography, drawing and architectural plans.
Across the rest of the exhibition, the technological setup is intentionally simpler, relying mainly on visual content, projections and light boxes to support the narrative.
Team
Project Director, Mediapro Exhibitions – Elisabet Pons
Curator – Galdric Santana
Spatial Design – Carles Ros
Lighting Design – Jordi Moya and Irene Bas
Scenography – Oriol Guardiola and Nuria Llorca
Creative Direction – Maria Leiva
Project Manager – Helena Vilà
XR & VR Production – Sandra Martínez
Content Direction – Alicia Billon and Maria Leiva
Research & Documentation – Daniel Escribano and Xavi Gonzalez
Gaudí Code Kids – Pau Ventosa
Art Direction – Fernando Alcazar and David Lanna
Installation Coordinator – Manel Hernandez
Technical Direction – Xavier Pamies
VR Production – Melt
XR Production – Tetravol
Exhibition Construction & Installation – Big Grup
Graphic Production – Sundisa
Marketing Director – Maria Sagrera
Distribution Director – Alba Collado
Project Advisors – Raúl Pedroche and Marta Domènech