To commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Verizon created “9/12: The Untold Story of Reconnecting New York.” This one-day, real-time immersive MMS experience used AR, VR, audio, and interactive media to tell the stories of the Verizon employees who were at the badly damaged corporate headquarters that connected Lower Manhattan and Wall Street, and their part in the restoration efforts that were crucial for the comeback of the city and the nation.

It’s a story that’s never been told, in a format that’s never been used before: text messages. In 2001, it was the latest way to communicate and in 2021, the most personal. The 1:1 nature of texting gave a meaningful platform to share the emotional employee stories that emerged in the days after 9/11. With every text documenting a moment, action or story delivered at the time the events actually happened 20 years earlier.

We invited users to step into the timeline of 9/12/2001 through a one-day, real-time immersive experience that put them in the shoes of Verizon employees who sprang into action to reconnect New York after the terrorist attacks. Eleven personal stories were told through MMS native content including phone calls reenacting historical moments, 360º interactive maps of Lower Manhattan, and AR “before-and-after” filters. It’s a nod to the basic tech of 2001 while featuring the cutting-edge mobile experiences of today—a story about the past told with a modern twist.

Because text messaging as an integrated media experience had never been done before, we had to solve how we could simultaneously send out a mass amount of high-volume content. 500K texts were sent over a 12-hour time period. All carefully orchestrated to accurately deliver the story in the correct sequence of events. For the first time ever, we used Twilio-driven SMS technology to create an interactive narrative, making careful tweaks throughout production to ensure content was delivered at the right time and in the right order to remain historically accurate. Interactive maps with dynamic lighting correspond to the time of day on 9/12/2001, and the user interface was referential of design from 2001, further bringing the past to life. AR and WebGL were also used to create the 3D scenes and buildings for users to explore and visualize the extent of the structural damage to Verizon headquarters.

Our success came from creating a nontraditional multimedia MMS platform. Existing phone apps became the springboard for immersive storytelling. Leveraging every native tool within a text conversation, we sent viewers a series of personal, poignant employee stories at the times they actually happened on September 12, 2001.