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Immersive · ITHF × Infosys
I put 150 years of
tennis history
into the metaverse.
Launched June 30, 2023
← Back to work
Immersive · ITHF × Infosys
The brief
The International Tennis Hall of Fame is a real building in Newport, Rhode Island — grass courts, 150 years of trophies, the actual racquets and dresses behind glass. Stunning, if you can get there. Almost nobody can.
ITHF teamed up with Infosys to kill the distance. Rebuild the museum as a place you walk into as an avatar — from a laptop, a phone, a headset, anywhere on earth. It went live June 30, 2023.
Infosys built the engine. I led the UX and UI — the part you actually see, touch, and find your way around.
What I owned
Every screen a visitor meets came through me. Where you land. How you move. The HUD. How you read a champion's whole career without hitting a wall of text. How trivia hands you points, and points pull you into the shop.
One rule sat above all of it: a tennis fan who has never held a game controller walks in and is not lost. No tutorial. No manual. You land on the lawn, you see the Hall, you go in.
First thirty seconds
Spawn point — your avatar, the welcome wall, the Hall straight ahead. No menu in the way.
The collection
In the gallery, the Hall of Famers aren't photos on a wall. They're figures caught mid-motion — Billie Jean King at the net, Arthur Ashe on serve, Rod Laver, Martina Navratilova, Esther Vergeer in her chair. You walk up. You walk around them.
Each one carries their career with them — titles, numbers, the trivia that rewards you for paying attention. I designed the read so it never turns into a Wikipedia page. You earn the story by getting close, not by opening a panel.
The induction gallery — stats, trivia and rewards built into the room itself.
Sense of place
We didn't drop the exhibits into a generic white void. The team rebuilt the actual grounds — the Victorian clubhouse, the horseshoe piazza, the grass courts the sport was basically born on.
On the Horseshoe Court you can serve a few yourself. That mattered to me: a museum you only look at is a brochure. One you can play in is a place. The whole job was making 'far away' feel like 'right here'.
The grass courts.
The clubhouse.
Behind the glass
The museum's crown jewels made the trip across — modelled, lit, and placed where you could actually get close to them.
Stan Smith's Adidas
The original pair — the shoe that outsold the player who put his name on it.
Graf's 1988 racquet
The racquet from the only Golden Slam in tennis history — all four majors plus Olympic gold.
Serena's 2018 dress
The Virgil Abloh design from her US Open return — fashion and tennis in one object.
The hardest part
The whole promise was reach — anyone, anywhere, any device. But 'realistic 3D' and 'opens on a five-year-old laptop or a mid-range phone' pull in opposite directions. Every gram of visual fidelity is weight someone's hardware has to carry.
So most of the real work was the trade-off. How good can the statues look before the scene stops loading for the people we built this for? Where do we spend the polygons — and where do we fake it and nobody notices?
I kept dragging it back to one question: who gets locked out by this decision? A prettier shadow isn't worth a fan in Manila who can't get through the front door. Reach won the arguments.
That tension never fully resolves. You just keep choosing the visitor over the screenshot.
The ITHF Metaverse launched in 2023 with Infosys. Here's the announcement from the Hall of Fame itself.