shipped / October 7, 2026
A Walkable History of Art: 82,139 paintings from Wikipedia, hung in 3D rooms you walk through
score paintings hung: 82,139
Jason Tragakis pulled 526 painters and 82,139 works out of Wikipedia and built a museum you walk with WASD, from Li Cheng to Banksy. The 3D gallery started, by his own account, as a single prompt. Then he "worked a lot on this."
Built by Jason Tragakis with a single prompt, then a lot of work.
see the announcement on Hacker News →instructionsdemosource
What it is
A Walkable History of Art is a museum in a browser tab. The tagline on the door: "Every artist, every work, under one roof." You scroll a timeline across more than a thousand years of painting, click a period, pick a painter, and walk into their gallery with WASD. Hold W to sprint. On a phone you drag to look and tap the floor to walk.
The collection comes from Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons: 526 artists and 82,139 artworks across 35 periods and traditions, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Persian as well as European. The rooms are arranged by date, each period gets its own room styling and music, and clicking a painting shows its details, dimensions and Wikipedia source. The Hacker News title sums up the range: "From Li Cheng to Banksy."
How it was built
Jason Tragakis, of justdataplease.com, put it on Hacker News today. The repo is MIT and the development guide is specific about the engineering: Next.js 16 with every one of the 526 galleries prerendered, React Three Fiber galleries that only render when something changes so "standing still costs no frames," and a fixed pool of 16 spotlights handed to whichever works are in view "so walking never recompiles a shader."
The AI part comes from the thread. A commenter said they had built almost the same 3D gallery with Claude last year, down to the lights, the benches and the walls. Jason's reply: "it started as single prompt so the model did its own work," and then, "after that i worked a lot on this." The ingest pipeline, the repair scripts and the performance probe are the "worked a lot" part.
Why we picked it
Because it is the best kind of project: a data person pointed a model at a museum and then did the real work of making 82,139 Wikipedia images walk at a decent frame rate. The footer gives all credit to Wikipedia and asks you to donate, the right instinct for a thing built on free knowledge.
Also, someone complained they could not jump onto the benches. Jason's answer: press P and enter the password Vandalism0. "This is supposed to be for educational purposes," he wrote, "but since you want a bit of fun."
He is Greek, and says Greek history might be the next building. We will take a ticket.
Shipped is Accept All's daily pick of things people build with AI. We are not affiliated with Jason Tragakis; the work and the credit are theirs, so go tell them it's good. Older: Darkplug: an iPhone and a $20 smart plug become a darkroom f-stop timer.