About The Great Experiment

The Great Experiment is an educational virtual reality (VR) experience that immerses participants within a highly authentic, virtual representation of the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall) at the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In a series of increasingly interactive participatory experiences and discrete stages, participants find themselves immersed and actively engaged in those historical moments surrounded by authentic avatars of the founders.

The Great Experiment is a project of the Shenandoah Center for Immersive Learning (SCiL) of Shenandoah University. It draws its name from a 1790 letter written by George Washington to English historian Catherine Macauley Graham which says, "The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment, for promoting human happiness, by reasonable compact, in civil Society.” 

The experience utilizes and explores immersive technology and spatial computing as a medium of scholarship and education, allowing participants to explore the power of presence in their experience of history and civic learning through an experiment of rational deliberation. This employs the pleasure of learning new things to the fields of both recreation and entertainment. 

Virtual reality possesses an analogous capacity to suspend the ordinary operations of human understanding and in a profound moment of presence, inserting people today into the altered state to create an extraordinary encounter with the past and an enduring learning experience in history. Participants in the immersive experience of The Great Experiment are engaged in a real-time, live, and participatory, albeit virtual, debate over the question of how to elect a chief executive of a republic.