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image for illustration: Joe Ross CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
As part of the United States’ 250th anniversary, CyArk has launched a new collection of Tapestry experiences that explore the American story through the power of place.
Cyark writes:
The America 250 collection brings together three sites, three time periods, and three distinct perspectives: the founding era of the American Revolution, the fight for educational opportunity during segregation, and the memory and service surrounding September 11th. Each experience tells the story of American history through a place where it happened — a home, a schoolhouse, a neighborhood restaurant — and the people connected to it. Through Tapestry, our free web-based storytelling platform, we bring these places online, combining immersive 3D environments, historical interpretation, and firsthand voices.
The George Wythe House offers a window into the Revolutionary period and the founding of the United States through the life of George Wythe and the household around him. Though less widely known today than his student Thomas Jefferson or friend George Washington, Wythe played a central role in shaping the early nation. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a legal scholar, a teacher, and an advisor to many of America’s founding leaders. The George Wythe House Tapestry allows users to explore the detailed interiors of the Wythe house, including period wallpaper, scientific instruments of the day, and even get up close to a copy of the Declaration of Independence with Wythe’s signature. Tapestry’s Explore in 3D feature let’s visitors walk down the entry of the house, uncovering more information about the home’s unique features. Visitors will also get to hear directly from Robert Weathers who perhaps knows George Wythe best, as he has been interpreting Mr. Wythe for over seven years as a nation builder at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Historic Russell School — Hillsborough, North Carolina
Built in 1926, the Historic Russell School is one of the last remaining examples of the Rosenwald Schools, a program that expanded educational opportunities for Black students across the American South during segregation. These schools were built through partnership. Black families and community members contributed money, labor, land, and leadership, alongside local governments and the Rosenwald Fund. The site’s connection to its community has never been broken. The building remains largely unaltered and is still supported by former students, their families, and local advocates who have worked to preserve its legacy. In the Russel School Tapestry, visitors can explore the two-room schoolhouse and its characteristic large windows, which were necessary to allow in enough light as there was no electricity. Visitors will also hear from two alumnae of the school, Bessie Pearly and Maedell Gattis, providing their firsthand memories of the significance of the place. Through their memories and stewardship, the school offers a personal connection to a chapter of American history that is still within living memory.
O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub — New York City, New York
Located steps from the 9/11 Memorial, O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub has grown from a neighborhood gathering place into a living memorial. In the years since September 11th, its walls have become covered with more than 7,000 patches, photographs, and mementos left by firefighters, police officers, military personnel, first responders, and visitors from around the world. Each object is a personal act of remembrance. Together, they form a tribute to sacrifice, service, resilience, and loss. Unlike a traditional memorial, O’Hara’s remains an active public space where people gather to eat, talk, and remember. Its meaning has grown over time through the people who have visited, returned, and left something behind.
Capturing Place in a New Way
These places carry meaning in their details: worn wood and plaster, the way light fills a room, the scale of a classroom, and the objects that collect on a wall over time. To convey not only the shape of each space but the experience of being inside it, CyArk captured the interiors for the America 250 collection using 3D Gaussian splatting, a newer method for creating photorealistic 3D representations of real places. For CyArk, this represents a different approach from many of our traditional documentation projects, which have often centered on LiDAR scanning, photogrammetry, and highly detailed geometric models. Gaussian splats allow us to capture a space with a different kind of visual immediacy. They preserve color, light, surface texture, and atmosphere in ways that are especially powerful for interiors filled with layered detail.
That matters for this collection. At O’Hara’s, the density of patches, photographs, and mementos is central to the story of the place. At the Historic Russell School, the scale and material character of the classroom help connect audiences to the lived experience of students and teachers. At the George Wythe House, the interiors help situate the founding era within the everyday spaces of a household shaped by both revolutionary ideals and enslavement. In the field, our team captured each interior on foot with the XGRIDS PortalCam, while exterior views were captured by drone. The finished experiences run directly in a web browser, opening these spaces to audiences far beyond the sites themselves. The result is a new kind of Tapestry experience for CyArk: one that brings together immersive storytelling, firsthand accounts, and true photorealistic 3D environments to help audiences feel closer to the places where history happened.
Three Places, One Story
As the country marks 250 years, this collection invites audiences to move beyond a single national narrative and encounter history through the places and communities that shaped it. These Tapestry experiences offer new ways to look closely, listen deeply, and reflect on the values, contradictions, struggles, and acts of service that continue to define the American experience. This collection was made possible with the support of Iron Mountain, and in partnership with Colonial Williamsburg, the Historic Russell School, and O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub.
Explore the America 250 collection below:
