The Mark Twain House and Museum: Using 3D Virtual Tours to Increase Access and Interest

In 1873 Sam Clemens — known to most of the world as Mark Twain — and his wife Olivia turned to New York architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter, to design their Hartford, Connecticut home. Nearly a century and a half later, the 11‚500-square-foot house is still a destination for everyone from groups of school children learning about their local author to people with a more macabre bent, excited to take a ghost tour at Halloween. 

Now, with the help of Capture Visual Marketing (CVM) and Matterport 3D technology, The Mark Twain House and Museum is bringing the beloved author’s Gilded Age home to the global masses. Anyone with an internet connection can virtually explore the three-story home through an immersive experience — stopping along the curated tour to engage with media tags that reveal information about everything from the paintings on the wall to the furniture in the rooms.

The virtual tour quickly hit 100,000 views and thanks to analytics powered by CVM, the team at Twain can see where their views are coming from — data that can inform other programs, such as marketing. Additionally, the Twain House has been able to link the physical donation box in the house to a donation page in the virtual tour, allowing far-off viewers to support the museum while extending its operating hours to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The benefits of 3D virtual tours for historic properties

In 2017, CVM’s founder, Tony Healy, was using Matterport’s 3D and virtual tour technology to help high-end real estate clients sell homes when he realized how historic homes could also benefit from this technology. When Healy approached the team at the Twain House, they were initially skeptical — worried that the free virtual tours would discourage guests from visiting in person. However, putting the 3D tour front and center on the website had the opposite effect. Ticket sales through the website actually increase in direct correlation to how prominently the virtual tour is displayed on the site. 

While increased ticket sales and global reach are a huge benefit of 3D virtual tours, there are many more reasons historic properties like the Mark Twain House benefit from this technology. For instance, historic homes may be beautiful, but they were not built with ADA compliance in mind. “For preservation reasons, we cannot make the second and third floor accessible to all visitors. The tour has acted as an excellent substitute for those folks, as a guide will ‘walk’ visitors through the upper floors to offer them a good substitute for being there,” says Pieter N. Roos, Executive Director.

Virtual tours have been an important part of increasing access to historic properties for years, however, the pandemic highlighted just how important this access is. “The tour is so good that the New York Times featured it early on in the pandemic as a way to see museums when everything was shut down,” says Roos. “Then they featured it a second time almost a year later. In fact, we had more people look at the virtual tour than normally go through the house in a good year.”Roos says over 130,000 people accessed the virtual tour just during the pandemic.

“As the pandemic starts to fade, we are pleased to still have the virtual tour into the future — as a tool for both marketing and interpretation of our museum. We always look for, and usually find, new ways to use it.” — Pieter N. Roos, Executive Director, The Mark Twain House & Museum

The 3D photography services that Capture Visual Marketing provides also come with some less obvious benefits: 

• Take an inventory — A comprehensive 3D tour also serves as an effective inventory of the historic, and often valuable, items within the property. Not only can this be used for insurance purposes, but it can ensure you have detailed photos of every inch of the property to inform repairs.
• Get accurate measurements — The Matterport 3D files are more than just beautiful, high-definition images; they also provide accurate measurements (especially when the rooms are empty). The 3D images can be converted to CAD files for architects and designers, given to movers to provide logistical plans, or even turned into floorplans.
• Enable virtual field trips — Take the virtual tour a step further, and do virtual field trips where a real-life guide can take groups through the house from the comfort of the classroom or the couch.
• Anxiety relief — People with anxiety about visiting new places or fears of accessibility due to physical limitations are able to relieve some of that stress by taking a virtual walkthrough and getting the lay of the land before visiting in real life. 

How it works

Creating a 3D virtual tour of a historic property is deceptively simple. CVM sets up the Matterport camera on top of a tripod — the camera rotates and records 60-degree segments until it creates a 360 bubble by connecting each of those segments. They make their way through the house a few feet at a time until the camera has stitched together a complete 3D image of the space. The CVM team is able to see the files in real-time, showing which areas still need to be scanned, and which items — like windows or mirrors — may need to be tagged to avoid an infinite mirror, fun-house effect.

Depending on the size of the property, post-processing can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a day to finalize. In the end, the properties have an embeddable URL with skin showing an index, and color-coded media tags.   

What’s next?

Capture Visual Marketing has recently connected with Austria-based ViewAR, to turn the immersive virtual tour into an in-person experience enhanced by augmented reality. Stay tuned!

Learn more about CVM’s work with historic and cultural properties here.