Ventuz Installation by MOSECO Qatar & Astucemedia wins APEX award

Ventuz installation created by Moseco Qatar & Astucemedia for The Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar wins prestigious APEX award

Moseco Qatar installation for The Media Majlis at Northwestern University in Qatar recently won the Educational Environments category at the 2020 Digital Signage Expo APEX Awards, with a state-of-the-art installation based on Ventuz real-time graphics solutions. Other prestigious finalists included landmark projects such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science & Engineering, and the South Florida Science Center and Aquarium.

Opened in May 2019, The Media Majlis is an innovative media museum dedicated to exploring journalism, communication and everything related to media within an interactive exhibition space, the first museum of its kind in the Arabic world.

In 2019 Moseco Qatar was commissioned to create several innovative audiovisual installations for the museum, with a strong focus on interaction and disruptive ways to display the information.

The combination of Ventuz real-time graphics software and Nvidia GPUs was the best solution for this project

Moseco created a first phase of the project using traditional media servers, but the only way of meeting the final installation requirements was the adoption of a real-time graphics solution. After evaluating several real-time graphics options in the market, Moseco chose Ventuz graphic solutions for its proven reliability, flexibility and remarkable interaction tools.

In order to present the amount of live data and media in a visually appealing way required a software solution that could harness the remarkable graphics processing capabilities of Nvidia GPUs and Ventuz software showed that it was the perfect fit for the task.

Canadian agency Astucemedia was also an integral part of the project for their vast experience in creative digital solutions and real-time data integration. Astucemedia created a custom solution for The Media Majlis that included an innovative Exhibition builder tool  with interactive & flexible graphics templates, powered by Ventuz software. 

The Exhibition builder is one of the most digitally advanced museum exhibition tools in the world. It allows curators, museums and exhibition specialists to create and build interactive exhibitions and optimize the visitor’s experience in an easy and efficient manner.

The substantial modular template library, can be customized for any exhibition and be used over hundreds of different screen ratios and technologies including, Videowalls, AR, VR, Interactive, Immersive and Mobile. Each component is divided into different compartments according to their purpose and functionality for ease of use.

With the constant evolution of audience expectations in the digital world, the Exhibition builder, combined with the Data platform is the key to reimagine engagement and support new technologies by providing visitors an inspiring experience with a next-generation of digital museum, The Media Majlis.

“The media Majlis Museum project required displaying a big amount of live data and extensive interaction, hence real-time graphics were the only choice. After some extensive research we found that the combination of Ventuz real-time graphics software and Nvidia GPUs was the best solution for the very demanding requirements of this project”, stated Mr. Marwan Mahmoud, Chairman of Moseco Qatar.

Scalability was also key for this installation, with more than 130 displays of different sizes, resolutions, aspect ratios, even different brands, all distributed in 8 different zones, each one with a special layout and setup. The graphics system should be able to cope with this enormous number of pixels while ensuring the minimum latency, and Ventuz cluster technology proved to be the best option for this requirement.

The graphics for the Armature area were especially tricky, with an installation of more than 50 displays mounted in a wave-shaped layout of various sizes., resolutions and orientations. Almost every display was unique, but they must create a cohesive graphic display. Ventuz was able to provide the required flexibility with a cluster of machines using its advanced synchronization tools.

Interactivity was a key requirement

Interactivity was another key requirement for this project, with a wide variety of interactive installations in most of the museum. Ranging from totem kiosks to interactive videowalls and touch tables. In addition, other areas required interactive content to be controlled from iPad tablets connected to the Ventuz graphics displayed on the screens.

The extensive set of interaction and live control data tools available in Ventuz was crucial to cope with all these interaction needs. Ventuz includes native support for touchscreens using industry standard protocols such as TUIO and Windows Touch, so creating advanced touchscreen/touch table interaction was very simple, without requiring any additional programming. In addition, Ventuz supports many communication and control protocols, such as OSC, which enabled the easy integration with rotary laser touch solutions for touch-ready videowalls and iPad command tablets.

Reliability was an additional requirement implicit in this project as a fixed installation that was meant to be self-running in front of a public audience for several hours every day of the week. Ventuz has a proven track record with fixed installations worldwide and this was crucial for Moseco Qatar. They decided to combine Ventuz with Dell professional workstations with Nvidia Quadro GPUs to ensure the highest reliability and performance.

In addition to all the requirements mentioned above all museum installations should include Arabic and English subtitles for both domestic and foreign visitors. This was an added benefit of the Ventuz graphics solution, with its robust subtitling tools and extensive support for non-western character sets needed to meet this requirement

The graphics pipeline is based on Ventuz applications workflow

The graphics pipeline is based on the traditional Ventuz graphic templates workflow, with Ventuz Designer creating the graphic templates, integrating all the graphic assets, animations, data connections, interactivity and other required functionality.

These templates are later transferred to Ventuz Director to control several Ventuz Runtime render engines that generate the final graphics and output them to the various display setups of each zone.

Data Platform, a solution developed by Astucemedia also, is the Content Management System (CMS) that handles all the data displayed in the graphics, including database connections to retrieve the live data and a web client for manual data filling and control.

Ventuz Director systems are running a plugin developed by Astucemedia, that connects with their Data Platform CMS to fill the templates with the final data and media assets.

In addition, Moseco installed an EVS Isilon video server system that is used to ingest, transcode and manage all the video content that will be later integrated inside Ventuz graphics.

“The high requirements of this project, which include lots of displays of different sizes, resolutions and orientations, interactivity and live data, required a very powerful, yet flexible, solution such as Ventuz, to allow us to get the graphic quality we aimed for while ensuring the maximum reliability and future scalability”, commented Ayoub Meziani, Solutions Developer at Moseco Qatar

For more information about the Media Majlis, and to explore its content, visit Media Majils

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