Chicago History Museum

Chicago00 is a ground-breaking collaboration between the Chicago History Museum and filmmaker Geoffrey Alan Rhodes to produce a series of virtual and augmented reality experiences using the enormous archive of historical photographs at the Chicago History Museum. The ambitious project has employed cutting-edge technology to publish four interactive Chicago history experiences in just three years. The first in the series, Chicago00 The Eastland Disaster, is an augmented reality tour along the Chicago River, at the downtown site where the passenger steamship Eastland capsized in the summer of 1915. The Chicago00 St Valentine’s Day Massacre VR app, released February 2017, transports audiences to the exact spots where photojournalists documented the gory aftermath of the famous gangland killing and superimposes them in virtual reality on the present-day site. In 2018, the project won an award for excellence from the American Alliance of Museums. Released in 2018, Chicago00 A Century of Progress is a virtual reality tour of the 1933 A Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. For the VR experience, drone photographers charted the path of the fair’s Skyride, a 219-foot-high ride across the entire fairgrounds, and matched it to historical photographs from the CHM archive. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of the protests, the Chicago 00 project released the virtual reality experience Chicago00 The 1968 DNC Protests, which is narrated by historian David Farber. Currently, the Chicago 00 team is producing a VR experience of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, to be released early next year.