Geoffrey Alan Rhodes' Collaboration with Chicago History Museum Wins Chicago Innovation Award

Chicago00, a ground-breaking collaboration between the Chicago History Museum and filmmaker and Associate Professor Geoffrey Alan Rhodes (Visual Communication Design), won a Chicago Innovation Award in the Social Innovator category. Chicago 00 is 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. Released in 2018, Chicago00: A Century of Progress is a virtual reality tour of the 1933 world's fair in Chicago. Currently, the Chicago 00 team is producing a VR experience of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, to be released early next year.