The National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, is getting a facelift.
Since 2023, the Museum and Memorial “has been carrying out a multi-year upgrade plan, the most expansive changes to the buildings and grounds since opening in 2006,” according to its landing page.
The modifications, the announcement continued, “will not only see upgrades in technology to tell new and interesting narratives from WWI, they will create a richer and more immersive visitor experience.”
Opening over Memorial Day weekend, the museum’s latest exhibit, “Encounters,” will take viewers through the lives of 16 individuals that include: Allied and Central Power combat soldiers; British colonial Indian soldiers; women working in munitions factories; and dissenters arrested and tried for anti-war stances.
Crafted from diaries, letters and photos, “Encounters” includes state-of-the-art media displays that will feature 1.25 mm Pixel Pitch LED Display technology from Nanolumens — the first installation of its kind in a museum in the U.S.
The museum aims for “Encounters” to go beyond the simple showcasing of artifacts and historical data. Delving into more than troop movements and the number of rivets on a Sopwith Triplane, the installation aims to fully engage its visitors visually and audibly on “a deeply emotional level, focusing on the human side of the war through the stories of individuals who lived it,” according to a museum press release.
This isn’t the museum’s first foray into immersing cutting edge technology and meshing it with the past.
In 2021, the National WWI Museum debuted its impressive virtual reality experience, “War Remains,” which allowed visitors to take a trip through time to the battlefields of World War I. The initiative was designed for viewers to feel — as much as possible — the true trench experience.
“We wanted to simulate what it was like to lose your hearing to an explosion,” director Brandon Oldenburg told Military Times in 2021. “Skywalker sound does an amazing job of putting ringing in your ears. You feel it, but you can’t hear it. … I think it makes a lasting memory of what it was like even though it is not even coming close to the real thing. You can walk out alive [and] unscathed.”
Now, the museum is once again leading the way when it comes to what museums of the present can and should be, with “stations” boasting recreated virtual scenes from the front lines, the home front and military hospitals replete with interactive soundscape technology found in just one other space in the U.S. — the Las Vegas Sphere.
According to the press release, “the spatial audio used in this exhibit creates a 360-degree sound environment, making it feel as if the voices, sounds, and stories are unfolding around visitors in real time.”
Despite more than a century separating museum-goers from the war’s end, the lives of the ordinary man and woman caught up in this titanic clash will once again be seen — and felt — like never before.
Renovations at the National WWI Museum and Memorial will continue through 2025.
“Encounters” opens Memorial Day weekend, 2025.
Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
