A virtual tour through history: Here’s how Shawnee Town 1929 drew technology award

If omicron has you feeling cautious but you still want to dive into some local history, Shawnee Town 1929 is ready for you. The living history museum’s virtual 360 tour recently received the 2021 technology award from the Kansas Museum Association.

The annual award goes to a museum that uses technology in a creative way.

“The 360 tour is designed as a virtual reality component to our program, so if you cannot physically be here to take a tour, you can do it in virtual terms,” said Charlie Pautler, director of the museum.

Pautler was thrilled to receive the award.

“It’s just recognition by your professional peers and validation of your efforts. It tells us that we’re headed in the right direction with our new education programming,” he said.

The tour allows you to visit all the various buildings at Shawnee Town, with extra tidbits of information, plus videos of volunteers and staff members acting out scenes to help immerse you in the 1920s era.

“We had staff and volunteers come in (wearing) their 1920’s outfits and do these little living history vignettes,” said Jenny Johnson, a museum interpreter at Shawnee Town who managed the project.

The idea was to recreate the experience of being at the museum as completely as possible.

“You can look at the ceiling in the building. You can look at the floor. You can look at everything between. Everything is viewable, and there are a lot of components,” Pautler said.

Museum staff had been considering various virtual options for a while, but in late 2020, they were able to start work on the 360 tour with funding from the city of Shawnee and Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act.

Johnson, who wrote the accompanying material for the tour, worked with Richard Lincoln, owner of virtual tour company PositiveSpin 360, to get all the technical pieces accomplished.

“Every spot you can walk to, every 20 feet on the sidewalk, outside and inside of buildings, he set up a tripod and special camera and leveled it. That took a lot of time. With costumed interpreters, it took extra time. We shot each scene multiple times from different angles,” Johnson said.

Adding to the challenge was the fact that in order for things to match when they stitched all the pictures together, they had to make sure the light — mostly sunlight — was the same every time. Changes in the weather and time of day made scheduling the various shoots challenging.

Although the program had a computerized voice included for accessibility, its constant mispronunciations and impersonal tone led Johnson and Pautler to scrap it in favor of recording volunteer interpreters and staff reading the various pieces.

“Once it was done, it really benefited the whole tour. … They can make the information much more interesting than the robot. It was an unexpected problem we were able to solve, and it ended up being a really great addition,” Johnson said.

They rolled out the tour in two parts, taking about a year to finish the whole thing. The first part went online in March 2021, and the second was up by October.

“Jenny really went above and beyond, and as a result she got an outstanding public service award, which is a city of Shawnee award, for the work that she did on the 360 tour during this time,” Pautler said.

Johnson said she’s gotten feedback on the tour from a variety of people, including a teacher who normally brings classes for in-person field trips but hasn’t been able to do so with the pandemic.

“She rented one of the (traveling artifact) trunks, and she got on our 360-degree tour and did a combined lesson and walked students through the site,” Johnson said.

Even a usually disruptive student was transfixed by the presentation, she said.

Looking to the future, Shawnee Town is working on a new multimedia experience that will cater to mobile devices.

To check out the virtual tour, go to shawneetown.org/education/360__tour.

This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A virtual tour through history: Here’s how Shawnee Town 1929 drew technology award."