The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum launched "Unhidden Heroines" on 18 June 2026, an augmented-reality experience that places the stories of five women who shaped American history onto five monuments and memorials on the National Mall in Washington, DC. It is part of the Smithsonian's programming for the nation's 250th anniversary, and it runs seven days a week through 31 December 2026.
Each story is anchored to a monument whose subject the woman's own work intersected with: Polly Cooper, the Oneida woman pivotal to the success of Washington's Continental Army, at the Washington Monument; Julia Ward Howe, who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as a rallying cry for the Union, at the Lincoln Memorial; Dr. Dorothy Height, the civil and women's rights activist known as the "Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement," at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial; Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the cryptanalyst central to cracking Nazi code during the Second World War, at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; and Mary Katharine Goddard, the printer who published the first copy of the Declaration of Independence to carry the signers' names, at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.
Visitors on the Mall scan a QR code and hold a phone or tablet up to the monument. Using geolocation and custom 3D models, the experience overlays a guided, interactive scene on the live camera feed, culminating in a monument-sized figure of the woman telling her own story. Scripts were drawn where possible from each woman's own words and performed by voice actors; the museum states that generative AI was not used for any of the illustrations, voices, scripts or 3D renderings.
The experience is delivered entirely in the mobile browser at unhidden-heroines.com, with no app to download. It requires camera, location and device-motion permissions and a network or Wi-Fi connection; the museum recommends iOS 26 or later with Safari or Chrome, or Android 14 or later with Chrome, and notes that devices older than an iPhone 13 may perform poorly. An "At Home" version lets audiences anywhere summon the same figures into their own surroundings, and a non-interactive read-along version, built to AAA-grade accessibility standards, serves devices and users who cannot run the AR. Audio narration with optional closed captions is available in every version. The museum says the experience collects and stores no user data.
The experience is lightly gamified: each of the five stories hides one collectible artifact, and finding all five unlocks a 20 percent discount code for the Unhidden Heroines merchandise collection. The museum also ran in-person programming at the Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building from 28 July to 11 August 2026, where visitors could collect a printed guide.
The digital experience was developed by the creative agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the women were illustrated by Believe, and the AR experience was built and designed in 3D by Current Studios. The museum acknowledges the support and collaboration of the Dorothy I. Height Educational Foundation. The museum does not yet have a physical building; legislation creating it passed in December 2020 and it is still working with Congress to finalise a National Mall site, which the release frames as part of the point of putting these stories on the Mall now.
