Here are three ways to explore Maryland’s maritime culture, virtually:
Old Point at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Photo from CBMM.
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum maintains historic vessels, like floating artifacts, at their dock in St. Michael’s. Their collection represents many of the types of watercraft that were developed and used on the Chesapeake Bay over the past 400 years. Some of the collection are rare-remaining original vessels and some are skillful replicas. For both historic and example boats, the CBMM website provides a multi-media experience to understand the history and construction, and restoration process of 12 unique vessels. For more photos of the traditional building of a replica Maryland Dove, be sure to check out their Flickr page.
Capturing the virtual footage by boat on the Patuxent River, 2017. Photo from Chesapeake Conservancy.
CHESAPEAKE CONSERVANCY’S VIRTUAL TOURS
While nothing beats the experience of seeing the beauty of the Chesapeake firsthand, the Chesapeake Conservancy has created 11 virtual river tours so that you can get out onto the water today. Some of the trails you can take are the Potomac River including Mallows Bay, the Patapsco River, the Nanticoke River, and the Patuxent River. Chesapeake Conservancy used technology deployed by Terrain360 – a company that captures amazing 360 images by walking, triking, or boating the trails with special equipment.
Historic Ships in Baltimore
Historic Ships of Baltimore is a unique organization that interprets a collection of marine resources including, the USS Constellation a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship designed and built by the United States Navy. The ship was built in 1854, using a small amount of material salvaged from the frigate USS Constellation, which had been disassembled the year before. Using technology from Matterport, anyone can explore the complex engineering of each of the ship’s decks online – if you have a VR headset, like a Google Cardboard, you can completely submerge into this maritime experience.
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