The New York Times commissioned us to recreate the Apollo 11 lunar site for an AR and VR experience to commemorate the 50th year anniversary of the moon landing and the public release of the astronauts’ photography.

The VR experience provides users with the opportunity to explore the moon landing through original pictures, as the astronauts took them. Using the Oculus Rift headset and accompanying controllers, users can look around the moon's surface and mimic the snapshots captured by those who landed on the moon 50 years ago.

An experience as rich in historical value and as monumental as the moon landing requires a fully immersive medium to truly embed viewers in the story and give them a sense of what it may have been like for those living out the experience in full.

Virtual Reality allows for new methods of storytelling within journalism that would be much harder to communicate via the written word.

The experience was demoed for the first time at an exclusive New York event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, before becoming available for public download via the New York Times App and Oculus store.

We were tasked with creating accurate models of the landing site to be viewed inside the New York Times digital issue as well as on Oculus Quests at a 50th celebratory event. The reconstruction of the scene was based on large amounts of research provided by NYT, which included maps, stitched panoramas and precise photo locations placed in a physically accurate 3D scene. The content was built and optimized for mobile hardware (phones and Quest) and developed in Epic’s Unreal Engine.

The final result was a mixed reality gallery that housed select photos and panoramas accurately placed in the recreated landing site. It was our aim to give the user the view that Neil Armstrong had while taking these photos on the surface of the moon.