History as Hologram

The Kennedy Space Center needed to update an aging display that no longer engaged modern audiences. The original exhibit was ambitious for its era: an articulating, Rube-Goldberg–like physical model spanning half a room. It captured decades of Cape Canaveral’s development in mechanical miniature. Over time, the story advanced beyond the exhibit’s ability to keep pace.

What followed was a two-pronged effort: adapting the technology and rethinking the story it needed to tell. Exhibitry’s holographic storytelling platform was pushed beyond its original use, expanded to carry far more history, context, and choice than it had previously been asked to hold.

But more than a technology upgrade, the project became a complete interpretive redesign, realized in a new form factor. The work returned to primary sources, current research, and decades of institutional memory. Historical timelines were reconstructed from scratch. Relationships between sites, missions, and eras were mapped anew. The central challenge lay in deciding what needed to remain visible, what could recede, and how visitors might navigate a century of history without being overwhelmed.

Holographic mapping and touch-driven interaction provided the solution. The landscape could shift across time. Demolished structures reappeared. Visitors controlled depth and pace, choosing their own paths through the material.

The result was not simply an updated exhibit, but a system for making history navigable, treating preservation, interpretation, and engagement as parts of the same problem: maintaining historical depth while enabling flexible exploration.