A 3D museum virtual world for people to explore the works of Teenie Harris (now in Open Beta!)

Charles Harris (often known by his nicknames "Teenie" and "One Shot") was a prolific photographer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, celebrated for his work chronicling life in the city's Black neighborhoods from the 1930s to 1970s, both independently and as a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier. In his work, we can particularly see a golden age of Pittsburgh's Hill District, a collection of neighborhoods celebrated for their immense cultural impact (nicknamed "Little Harlem" at the time) and center of progress in racial integration in south-west Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh's Black History is visible in the approximately 80,000 photographs in the Charles "Teenie" Harris archive. We want you to explore that history.

Explore the Archive

Placing an archive of that many photographs into a physical space is infeasible --- no real museum is big enough! But thanks to the functionally infinite allowance of digital space, we've spatialized the digital collection into a giant digital museum of over 2000 rooms. 

Explore those rooms, view some featured collections of photographs, and even make your own digital exhibits of these photographs.

Join Conversations about History (big and small)

Communication is core to this museum. For any photograph you see, you can leave notes to communicate with other museum visitors. Imagine an art museum where you can leave sticky notes everywhere --- it's kind of like that (but classier)!

Explore on whatever device you have!

The application is built to run on personal computer (PC/Mac/Ubuntu), mobile device (iOS and Android), and virtual reality headsets (Quest 2, 3, 3S, Pro). Many of these version are not yet publicly available to download (mainly due to the tedious process of getting applications on many online storefronts), but we're working on it!

The included downloads on this page are for the Windows (more on the way).

Thanks to our collaborators!

The Virtual Museum of Charles "Teenie" Harris is made possible by a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing & Information and the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the generosity of the Hillman Foundation. The application is continuing to be developed by faculty and students at Pitt facilitating community-engaged design research with community members in Pittsburgh's Hill District.

Do you have feedback?

This application is a work-in-progress! If you have thought on how the system should change, you can message our lead developer, Pat Healy, at pat.healy@pitt.edu