Designing immersive media to protect cultural heritage

National Geographic magazine assigned me a cover story on Public Lands in 2016, specifically focused on the gutting (by 85%) of Bears Ears National Monument. It was story that, at its heart, was a quest to save a living museum - a landscape of over 100,000 sites of “archeological significance,” and all together one vast sacred site to the Indigenous communities in the region. This story needed more dimensions than a magazine could give, and more voices than the editorial structure could accommodate so I set about designing a way to add both. The project morphed and branched into several over the next years and resulted in a Webby Award winning VR experience (for Best Interactive Design), but also, and most importantly, for documentation and visualizations that helped restore the Monument boundaries and protect new areas in danger.

Drag the frames of the videos below as they play to see each scene in 360 video. In each you will hear elders from the Zuni, Hopi, and Jemez Pueblos guide you through these remote sacred sits in Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. The core of each video is a photogrammetry model made from thousands of images stitched together into a millimeter accurate virtual model that can be used by archaeologists and conservationists to help study and preserve these unique cultural heritage sites.