What Is XR and How Nashville Adventures Uses It to Bring History to Life
- Paul Whitten
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
There's a guy on almost every tour. Arms crossed. Skeptical. His wife signed them up, he's being a good sport about it. He's not a history person. Never has been. And about fifteen minutes into our XR Nashville History Tour, that guy is standing on the riverfront with his mouth open, watching an 18th-century fort materialize in front of him right where it actually stood. That's when I knew we had something.
That's exactly why Nashville Adventures built the XR History Tour.
So What Is XR, Exactly?
XR stands for Extended Reality. It's a term that covers the full spectrum of immersive technology: augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality all live under that umbrella.
Here's the practical difference. Virtual reality (VR) takes you somewhere else entirely. You put on a headset and the real world disappears. Extended reality keeps you right where you are. The street is still the street. Your guide is still standing there. But layered onto what you see through the device are digital scenes, historical figures, buildings, moments in time, appearing in the actual physical space where they happened.
That last part is what matters. Anybody can watch a documentary. This puts you at the corner where history turned.
How the History Glasses Work
I found our technology partner, See Reality, at a conference in Charleston, South Carolina. I was looking for something to close the gap between telling a story and having someone feel it. When I saw what they built, I knew immediately it was the right fit for Nashville.
The device they make is called the History Glasses. It looks a little like a compact pair of binoculars. You hold it up to your eyes. Nothing straps to your face, nothing touches your head. You can lower it and you're right back in downtown Nashville. Raise it and you're looking at 1779.
Here's what makes it work for a group tour specifically: our guide launches every headset simultaneously from a single app. All ten guests see the same scene at the same moment. Nobody's fumbling with settings or falling behind. The guide keeps talking, keeps telling the story, and the technology just... appears. Seamlessly.
Groups on our Nashville XR Tour are capped at ten people. That's deliberate. This isn't a stadium experience. It's a conversation with history.
The Four Moments That Change People
Fort Nashborough and the Birth of a City
The tour starts at Riverfront Park. We're standing at one of the most historically significant pieces of ground in Tennessee, and most people walking past it every day have no idea.
When guests raise the History Glasses here, they see Fort Nashborough appear. The original 1779 settlement. The beginning of everything that would become this city. Standing at the actual spot where James Robertson and his group came down the river and decided this was the place... that hits different when you can see it instead of just hearing about it.
Nashville didn't start with honky-tonks. It started with a fort on a bluff above the Cumberland. That's the story we open with.
Printer's Alley and the Musicians Who Started There
Most visitors to Nashville know Broadway. Few know Printer's Alley. And fewer still know who actually launched their careers in those narrow, storied blocks.
The XR scene here tends to produce the most surprised reactions of the whole tour. People genuinely don't know this history. The entertainment culture that Nashville became famous for didn't just appear. It grew in small, loud, smoky rooms where musicians played night after night before anyone was paying attention. The Alley was part of that story in ways that most tour guides skip over entirely.
William Strickland and the State Capitol
This is my favorite moment on the entire tour. And I'll give you the short version here, but the full story is better on the sidewalk.
William Strickland was the architect hired to design the Tennessee State Capitol in 1845. He was one of the most accomplished architects in America. He designed the building. He oversaw the construction. He spent years of his life on it. And he loved it so much that when he died in 1854, before the building was even finished, they buried him inside it. In the walls.
Go look that up. It's real.
On the tour, guests get to see the Capitol under construction through the XR glasses and hear directly from Strickland himself. Standing outside a building knowing that a man is literally entombed inside it changes how you look at it. That's Nashville. That kind of story is everywhere here, just waiting to be told.
The Cannon Shot on the Cumberland
We end with something nobody forgets. Guests get to fire a cannon at a ship on the Cumberland River.
I'm not going to oversell it. Just know that when you see the flash and the splash out over the water, standing exactly where someone did that same thing a couple hundred years ago, it lands. Adults and kids both lose their minds a little bit. And that energy is exactly how I want people to feel when they leave. Not like they sat through a lecture. Like they participated in something.
What Happens to People on This Tour
I've watched hundreds of people put on the History Glasses now. The reaction is almost always the same. First, they're impressed by the technology. Then something shifts, and they forget about the technology entirely. They're just in the story.
That's the goal. The XR is the door. The history is the room.
The guests who move me most are the reluctant ones. The person who came because someone else wanted to. The one who told me at the start that they "don't really do history." By the time we're standing outside the Capitol talking about William Strickland buried in those walls, they're asking more questions than anyone else in the group.
Nashville has one of the most layered, surprising, underrated histories of any city in America. It just needed a better way in.
Come See our Nashville XR Tour for Yourself
The Nashville XR History Tour runs 90 minutes, starts at Riverfront Park, and fits a maximum of ten guests per tour. It's built for families, first-time visitors, locals who think they already know this city, and yes, for the person who swears they're not a history person.
Especially for that person.
If you want to see Nashville the way most people never do, book your spot here. We'll see you on the riverfront.
