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Miraculously, it doesn’t feel crowded. The front gallery presents a closely curated selection of some of the museum’s most prized objects — a vanishingly rare gladiator helmet from 100 CE, a finely crafted helmet from Japan, a child’s breastplate, and Philip’s gauntlets. The rear gallery, by contrast, offers visitors hands-on displays, while presenting most of the collection in “open storage,” a vast array of armaments behind glass that visitors can explore via a dedicated app on wall-mounted tablets.

The front gallery’s central platform presents three distinct styles of armor.Charles Sternaimolo/Worcester Art Museum

While the 1,500-object collection, said to be the country’s second largest, skews European, curators have sought to tell a global story, presenting weapons and armor from India, Egypt, Japan, and beyond.

“We decided from the outset that to make it different we were going to focus globally,” said Jeffrey Forgeng, WAM’s curator of arms, armor, and medieval art. “Elsewhere, you are looking at European knights in shining armor front and center.”

To that end, the central platform in the front gallery presents visitors with three divergent displays of armor: a 19th-century Sudanese combination, a suit of 16th-century battlefield armor from southern Germany, and a ceremonial suit of armor from northern India in the late 1700s to 1800s.

The global story unfolds across freestanding displays and wall cases that ring the central platform. One wall is devoted to finely crafted objects from the samurai’s arsenal: a collection of arrowheads, spearheads, katana blades, utility knives, and tsubas — ornate handguards that could be swapped out to suit the occasion.

There is a display of helmets from around the world and through the ages, armor for horses, a golden standard shaped like a fish from southern India, and a suit of chain mail whose circular links are stamped with the names of Islam’s founding figures. There are katars and patas (punch daggers and gauntlet swords), a hand cannon from Japan, and a European ceremonial sword whose hilt is in the shape of a hand.

The front gallery presents many of the collection’s star pieces.Zachary Critchley/Worcester Art Museum

Forgeng said that although many of the objects have “surface differences,” arms and armor carry underlying cultural signifiers that transcend “not only space, but also time.”

“There’s that sort of legendary past being evoked,” he said. “Everybody instantly gets them at that visceral level.”

Director Matthias Waschek said the new galleries deliver on a promise WAM made more than a decade ago when it acquired the collection from the city’s erstwhile Higgins Armory Museum.

Not only has WAM kept the collection intact and in the city, he said, but it has nearly doubled the number of objects on display across two sizable galleries.

“I still have to pinch myself,” said Waschek. “In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined what [the staff has] done here.”

If the front gallery boasts the stars of the collection, the rear gallery gives a sense of its breadth. Using an innovative “open storage” plan, curators have assembled more than 900 objects in the rear gallery. That may sound overwhelming (a typical gallery at WAM displays just 25 items), but the displays are divided into numbered sections, and visitors can call up information about specific objects using a bespoke app on nearby tablets.

The new galleries present more than 1,000 objects thanks to an innovative “open storage” display.Zachary Critchley/Worcester Art Museum

The exhibit has other innovations as well. In addition to a corner with puppets and other materials for young people, the gallery has several freestanding cases where visitors can try out replica arms and armor for themselves, be it donning a helmet, hoisting a sword, or slipping into a gauntlet.

Waschek said the gallery, which has ample open space, could easily host gallery talks or drawing contests, among other activities.

“It’s a spirit of play,” he said. “It really integrates this idea of interactivity. It could change the model of what museums can do, and it might inform our thinking as we are renovating our other galleries.”

Many objects in the front gallery gleam after conservation treatment; the rear gallery’s open storage, by contrast, displays objects in varying states of conservation.

William MacMillan, who’s worked as project conservator on the collection for decades, said that arms and armor, an amalgam of different metals, woods, and leathers, present distinct conservation challenges.

“It’s a perfect combination of everything that doesn’t want to work together,” said MacMillan, who spent four months cleaning an Italian suit of armor, one postage stamp-size section at a time. “I describe it as holding back the ocean with a broom. All of this just wants to rot away.”

Visitors can learn about individual objects using a dedicated app on wall-mounted tablets.Zachary Critchley/Worcester Art Museum

The second-floor galleries, which will require timed-entry reservations, are part of a broader fund-raising effort at the museum to raise $125 million by 2028.

Forgeng, who’s curated the arms and armor collection for more than a quarter century, said the new galleries are the culmination of a professional journey that started at Higgins Armory Museum, the now-closed organization that transferred its collection to WAM.

“In a lot of ways, the entire 25-plus years that I’ve been curating the Higgins collection has been moving toward this,” he said. “It feels like [we] finally brought the collection to safe haven.”

Malcolm Gay can be reached at malcolm.gay@globe.com. Follow him @malcolmgay.