The United States Navy

The US Navy celebrated its 250-year anniversary on November 15, 2025

Our long-time partner, Inhance, was awarded the project to create a multimedia presentation. Inhance reached out to Access TCA to create the physical environment in Philadelphia in a building next to Independence Hall, where the Continental Navy was created.

The Experience

What Access did was create a temporary museum featuring exhibits of artifacts, highlighted by Inhance’s digital assets, including a 360-degree immersive naval experience. The Navy Museum provided us with a mix of authentic artifacts and 3D recreations. Most of the items were physical artifacts, such as the bugle that a Navy bugler played to alert sailors when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The panels Access created are paintings with a smattering of artifacts.

The display begins with portraits and paintings of the naval battles. As we move forward in time, they become black-and-white photos, then color photos, then old black-and-white videos, then color videos. That is a great series of the Navy’s transformation throughout its history.

Now the Navy has this amazing underwater drone that takes 40,000 data points per second. It can map out shipwrecks. They can find incredibly detailed information on objects thousands of feet underwater. For example, we thought the XYZ battleship sank because it was bombed, but now that we’ve scanned the wreck, we really see that the hole looks like it was actually sunk by a submarine with a torpedo. That’s the underwater archaeology section.

Then we transition to the 360-degree theater created by Inhance using AI, which brings vintage portraits and photographs to life and generates AI voices to read from the crew’s diaries. The paintings of battles and ships move, the cannons fire, and there’s a showcase of modern U.S. aircraft carriers to give a glimpse of what it’s like to live and work aboard the pinnacle of naval technology.

In a relatively small space that was previously a coffee shop, we produced about 100 panels. We developed detailed planning for the wayfinding layout to tell a chronological story within a limited area. The museum wasn’t cramped, but clearly, we were fitting 250 years into a compact space.

Unfortunately, the celebration of the Navy’s 250-year anniversary coincided with a government shutdown, which reduced the museum’s scheduled month-long opening to a week.