Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Step Inside a New York Tenement

The Washington Post has created a virtual tour which allows you to step inside a New York tenement building and explore how people lived in the city at the beginning of the 20th Century. The tenement at 97 Orchard Street, Manhattan is one of two historical buildings owned by the Tenement Museum. Each building has been preserved to provide a sort of time capsule of life in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The Post's Tenement Museum Virtual Tour provides you with a unique first-person view of a preserved tenement building. As you scroll through the Post's interactive tour you are taken through the front door into the building's basement saloon. Keep scrolling and you progress through the property, visiting the saloon kitchen, the back courtyard and the upstairs apartments. Each room in the tenement building represents a particular period in history. Many rooms in the museum have been left as they were found, while others have been recreated to look as close as possible as to how they would have appeared during a specific period in time.

In order to create this amazing photogrammetry tour the Washington Post used a lidar scanner, drone-shot imagery and handheld cameras to scan and photograph the building and rooms from all angles.

The use of photogrammetry to create interactive 3D models is a growing trend in data journalism. Here are links to some other great examples of news organizations using 3D models to illustrate and explain major news events or to provide an interactive tour of an historical site:

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