Case study · Mount Vernon · 2018–2024
An Immersive Virtual Mount Vernon, Used in Classrooms Nationwide
A custom-built virtual tour built on HDR photography, layered stories, and curatorial commentary. Reached 4M+ visitors with an 18-minute average dwell time — museum-grade engagement for a website experience.
The brief
Build an online estate that lets anyone — student, teacher, researcher, or armchair traveler — walk Mount Vernon’s grounds, peek into the rooms, and follow Washington’s stories without ever leaving home. Make it good enough that a school district could use it instead of a field trip when the field trip wasn’t possible.
What we did
HDR photography of the estate
We shot every major site — the Mansion, the outbuildings, the gardens, the distillery, the gristmill, the library — in vivid HDR panoramic photography, capturing the place under the kind of light most visitors never get to see it in.
Stories layered on the photography
Each hotspot is a doorway: into a video, a primary-source document, a piece of curatorial commentary, a Washington letter, or a deeper room you can step inside. The interaction loop kept people exploring for an average of 18 minutes per session — a number that puts it in the top tier of any cultural-institution digital experience anywhere.
Built for classrooms
The tour was designed with teachers in mind from day one: clean navigation, accessible language toggling across five languages, and an interpretive depth that supports a real lesson plan. It became a fixture in social studies curricula nationwide and a quiet workhorse for schools that couldn’t bring kids to Virginia.
Why it mattered
An 18-minute dwell time on a website is museum-grade engagement — proof that depth and craft online can rival the visit itself.
For a sector that often treats digital as a brochure, the virtual tour was a working argument for what a great cultural-institution digital product can be — not a marketing asset, but a destination in its own right.