CyArk, the cultural heritage digital preservation nonprofit, is launching the America 250 Tapestry Collection. The collection is made up of three U.S. heritage interiors reconstructed with gaussian splatting and rendered directly in a web browser.
The three sites anchor the collection in lived American spaces. The George Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia presents period interiors, scientific instruments, and a copy of the Declaration of Independence bearing Wythe’s signature, with Colonial Williamsburg interpreter Robert Weathers, who has portrayed Wythe for more than seven years, among the named voices. Throughout the experience are spatial hotspots, providing additional context as you move past them.
The Historic Russell School in Hillsborough, North Carolina is a 1926 Rosenwald School, narrated in part by alumnae Bessie Pearly and Maedell Gattis. O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub in New York City, beside the 9/11 Memorial, is documented with the 7,000-plus patches and mementos covering its walls. While one could imagine how laborious faithfully reproducing that space would be traditionally, gaussian splatting nails it out of the box. The collection is supported by Iron Mountain, with Colonial Williamsburg, the Historic Russell School, and O’Hara’s as partners.
“Splats have really changed how we approach heritage documentation. We can capture in a fraction of the time compared to traditional LiDAR and photogrammetry, and we hold onto the reflections, the way light falls, the surface detail that a mesh flattens. For cultural heritage, that’s a lot of what makes a space feel alive.”
The collection runs on Tapestry, CyArk’s free web based storytelling platform, which the organization has used before for gaussian splatting heritage tours of sites including Pompeii and Civita di Bagnoregio. Each of the three sites includes a first person “Explore in 3D” walk mode, so the splat scene is traversed on foot rather than orbited. Each interior was, in CyArk’s words, “captured on foot with the XGRIDS PortalCam, while exterior views were captured by drone.” The PortalCam is XGRIDS’ handheld spatial camera, which recently took top honors at NAB 2026. It outputs through XGRIDS’ LCC/LCC2 pipeline.
On the delivery side, the CyArk team is using the PlayCanvas Engine and World Labs’ Spark.js renderer over WebGPU. The asset formats it references are SPZ and SOGS, the compressed splat formats that have moved through the PlayCanvas ecosystem over the past year. The bundle also references Cesium / 3D Tiles streaming for the larger scenes.
As lifelike 3D continues to proliferate throughout industries, one of the largest applications will be educational and cultural heritage. There is so much to learn, explore, and document throughout human history. By pairing it not only with the lifelike visuals from gaussian splatting, but also the easy distribution, and location based annotations, we can enrich our own understanding of historical events.
The collection formally launches today and you can explore the three Tapestries here: George Wythe House, Historic Russell School, and O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub.
