The Lincoln Memorial
The National Park Service asked Bluecadet to build a website for the Lincoln Memorial. Using a combination of photography, video interviews with park rangers, and new web technologies, we produced a high-impact interactive site. The outcome was a virtual encounter with the memorial that brought it down to a human level while simultaneously encouraging reverence for its history.
AAM Muse Award Winner, SILVER
Webby Awards Official Honoree: Cultural Institutions
Communication Arts WebPick of the Week
What We Did
Bluecadet delivered an interactive, self-directed tour of the memorial. People explored the building and its elements in depth and detail, propelled forward by seamlessly integrated high-end video, still photography, and fifteen high-resolution immersive panoramas.
How We Did It
We used spherical panoramic photography to capture every inch of the memorial, creating a completely immersive experience. Virtual visitors were free to “walk” around the grounds, stopping at any one of 21 vantage points to engage with the memorial as if they were actually there.
Interactive elements within the panoramas triggered still photographs of important elements of the memorial. People explored these images in high detail using an interactive zoom feature.
Why It was Special
As cool as the technology was, it was the voices of the park rangers talking about their own experiences with the memorial that had the most impact. The edited videos included still photography, video shot on-location, archival footage provided by NPS, and music. Musical backgrounds were chosen in conjunction with NPS and edited in harmony with the spoken narration.
A High Goal for Accessibility
Everyone everywhere needed to share the same rich online interactive experience.
The site provided multiple ways to experience its content. Captioning was available for all videos, and audio for the videos was available for download on its own. There was even an HTML-only version with alternate versions of all content, such as transcriptions of the videos and in-depth descriptions of the images.
How It Turned Out
The outcome of the project was an entirely new way to experience the Lincoln Memorial.
The design succeeded because it stepped back and allowed the content to speak for itself. The stories and histories of the park rangers created a sense of intimacy between visitors and the memorial. They made the abstract concrete, and in doing so they erased the distance between history and the present.