Take a guided tour through the MAS via an interactive livestream

The brand new 'Museum aan de Stroom' (MAS) in Antwerp has been a big hit with Belgian visitors. To launch it internationally, Belgian communication agency Prophets came up with the idea of a so-called 'phygital tour'. This is a digital ‘live video tour’ offered by a physical guide at the museum, whose movements can be controlled using the arrow keys on the keyboard. The guide shoots what's in front of the camera and this footage is streamed live over the internet to the individual visitor's screen. The result: a great way to provide an international audience with a preview of the MAS, its collection and even the Antwerp skyline.

To help put this innovative idea into practice, Prophets contacted multimedia and streaming specialists Rambla. Our main challenge was to integrate the virtual tour into the existing MAS infrastructure in a non-intrusive way. Among others, this meant using the existing wireless network at the MAS for streaming the video, and providing the guides with the kind of equipment that allowed them to produce live video while reacting to external commands and at the same time remain fairly inconspicuous.

Therefore, each guide has been equipped with an Axis IP cam (plus battery pack) which streams its video via the wireless access points inside of the museum. To overcome the bandwidth issues which arose from using the MAS network, our engineers customized the network scripts on the IP cams to make them switch faster to the most appropriate access point. To preserve the realtime aspects of the tour as much as possible, we set up a dedicated low latency configuration on our Wowza streaming servers. And to assist the guides with the framing of their shots, we made the IP cams send a snapshot every second to the Rambla CDN, so the guide could inspect it via his or her PDA.

To end on a practical note: the 'phygital tour' is still open to visitors during the museum’s opening hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. until Sunday 5th of June.