The distance between us and history

Ask most people about a figure from history and you'll get the version they were handed: a paragraph from a textbook, a face on a bill, a documentary they half-remember. The whole of a human life, flattened into a fact to be recalled. The distance between us and the people who made the world we live in is enormous, and we mostly don't notice it, because we've never known it any other way.

That distance is the thing we exist to close. Everything we build is a different way of shortening it.

One mission, many front doors

People meet history in different places and different moods. A family meets it on a Saturday at a museum. A student meets it on a Tuesday night with a reading due. A kid meets it on their phone, between other things. A creator meets it while making something for an audience. Each of those is a real chance to close the distance — and each one asks for a different kind of experience.

• —In museums, we let visitors ask the person behind the exhibit their own question.
• —In classrooms, we turn a reading list into people a student can actually talk to.
• —In games, we let anyone step into the moment and find out how they'd have held up.
• —In studios, we help creators bring faithful historical voices into their stories.

We didn't set out to make four products. We set out to close one distance, and it turns out the distance is everywhere.

The same care, wherever you meet them

What holds it together is a standard, not a technology. Wherever you meet one of our figures — in a gallery, a lecture hall, or a game — you are meeting someone built from what they actually said and did, careful about what the record supports, and honest about what it doesn't. Getting a person right is the work. The rest is just deciding where you'll run into them.

History belongs to everyone, and almost no one gets to meet it. We'd like to change the second half of that sentence.