Some cities and countries around the world may have reopened, but large-scale events will be the last to return–and in the meantime, brands have taken their events and experiences online.

But despite operating in a time of immense experimentation and rethinking the way we use online tools that bring people together, many brands seek to translate their existing experiences to a digital format, when they should rebuild them from the ground up to take advantage of the features that make livestreaming a unique medium–and build a sense of presence and placemaking in the process.

Unfortunately, popular livestreaming technologies lack that creative potential. Forced to rapidly pivot their event strategies, brands have latched onto platforms and tools that are familiar to them, designed for conference calls—but a video conference platform isn’t a livestream strategy. Meanwhile, setups like those used to capture live events for TV are clunky, complicated, and difficult to coordinate for production teams that remain remote.

Building on years of developing live experiential events that take place online and off, our experiential team has taken our learnings about what truly brings a live experience to life, and has developed a proprietary livestreaming suite that enables brands to take control and build dynamic experiences through a fun, lightweight and intuitive interface: LiveXP. You may have seen some of the experiences that LiveXP has enabled before, like our virtualization of BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival.

“The strength of the suite is that it’s so open and customizable that anything can be done,” says Rafael Fittipaldi, Partner & Creative Tech Director at MediaMonks Sao Paulo. LiveXP takes the baton from several of our previous live experiences–like Old Spice’s Foam Zone–and enables an even greater level of interactivity and versatility that’s missing from so many virtual events today. “Built for creatives, by creatives, the tool offers unprecedented freedom to power live, digital interactive.” Through this versatility, brands have an opportunity to develop more meaningful experiences for their at-home audiences.

Make the Live Experience Unique to an On-Demand One

Placemaking and presence might seem at odds with one of the primary benefits of a virtual event (or even a livestreamed version of an in-person one). After all, you can always catch a recording later, rather than be part of the live experience. But there’s still fun in anticipating the “big moment” and enjoying it with friends, especially when you add digital venues and game platforms into the mix. This need to partake in a collective human experience offers creative opportunities to build a sense of excitement and anticipation–and even a bit of FOMO.

“If you’re going to SXSW for example, you’re going to be going with friends and attending a lot of parties,” says Ciaran Woods, Executive Producer Experiential & Virtual Solutions at MediaMonks. “Can you expect the same for people attending something virtually—that they’ll block out their day and set things up for an optimal viewing experience?” The same goes for professional events; the value is not often on stage as much as it is in the handshakes and conversation that happens in the hallways between sessions.

Brands can try to capture this magic by building in a sense of exclusivity—that cachet of saying “I was there”—by offering digital “swag” rewarding engagement, or by including direct opportunities to participate in what’s happening on the screen. The virtual Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival used LiveXP to play to this advantage by highlighting chat comments, offering trivia questions and giving the community a chance to engage directly with performers through Q&A’s–whether they were watching on YouTube or Facebook. These indelible moments are critical to modernizing the livestreaming experience and delivering on the true potential of the medium.

Two-Way Interaction Redefines Virtual Presence

We’ve long called for digital interactivity to be baked into a live experience, though we often find that brands aren’t leaning into it enough. Consider all the webinars you’ve watched on a video conference platform whose interactive element is limited to a chat in the sidebar (or if you’re lucky, you might be given a Twitter hashtag to network or backchannel there). These tools are useful, but they fail to really capture what makes being at a live event exciting: building memories through engaging with others in the moment.

Livestreams should go further than being treated as just a one-way broadcast. This doesn’t benefit the audience alone; an event’s performer—whether they’re a musician, a conference speaker or athlete—thrives on seeing the energy of the audience at physical events. This has prompted the MediaMonks team to flip the focus not just on what’s happening on a digital stage, but what’s happening in the audience, too.

“We want to visualize a sense of presence,” says Woods. “That’s always something we’ve been pushing for in a livestream. What we’re seeing now is that it’s not just a remote in the hands of the audience, but also giving the speaker a sense of presence and the ability to listen and react.”

There are many ways this can play out, depending on the event itself: webinars can track real time interactions to topics throughout a talk, a live viewer count can translate into visual effects in a virtual conference, and cheering from the sidelines in the chat can trigger audio cues as athletes play over a livestream. Spectatorship is an important part of such events, and modern livestreams must reflect that.

By connecting seamlessly with livestream platforms and their communities, our proprietary LiveXP suite allows us to enable these interactions and more, powered by dynamic 3D assets and interactive overlays that can be switched up on the fly. Built for creative storytelling in mind, these streams elevate audiences from mere viewers to the role of true collaborators.

Of course, equally important to what happens during a live event is what happens before and after. When planning a digital live event, consider the total end-to-end experience. “What we’re focusing on is covering the entire journey—not only registration and communicating in the lead-up, but also thinking about teaser content and how to make even those interactive as well,” says Woods.

No matter what platform you’re hosting an event on, LiveXP’s versatility enables bespoke experiences to achieve your brand’s specific needs. “This isn’t about licensing a webinar tool and adapting your content to its limitations,” says Fittipaldi. “In collaboration with our clients on live experiential projects, we can customize the tool internally to fit unique brand and creative needs.”

From content that builds excitement to analytics-driven takeaways that can aid in lead nurturing or recommending further content down the line, there’s great potential for brands to upgrade their livestream strategies and connect more directly with audiences online. Building a space that enables digital presence may seem challenging, but new tools and ways of defining digital events offer opportunities to drive impact. With LiveXP powering the live digital experiences we build for audiences today, MediaMonks is able to enable these projects faster and with greater impact.

See for yourself what LiveXP can do.

How much time have you spent in video calls today? The answer is probably “too much,” and you may have a neck ache and a foggy, burnout-induced mind to prove it. While technology is invaluable for connecting people, too much time staring at a grid of faces can be exhausting for many—but there’s a better way.

To break away from the repetitive notion of video call after video call, the Labs team experimented with how machine learning can augment video conferencing for a better experience. The result is a game that challenges users to quickly find a random object and show it to their webcam. Using an object-detecting machine learning model to identify whether the chosen object is shown, the app awards a point to whoever finds it first. The frantic game not only offers an opportunity to get together and have fun at home, but also gets people moving.

Using a lightweight machine learning model that enables object detection locally within a web browser, the game is compatible with any video conferencing platform that allows screen sharing. Connecting is merely a matter of loading up the web page and sharing your screen—and then the fun begins.

The game’s development began as a way to rethink the potential of video conferencing, breaking away from the buttoned-up approach and offering a space for play and fostering relationships. “The basis of the idea came out of the COVID situation that led people to work and socialize remotely,” says Joe Mango, Creative Technologist on the MediaMonks Labs team. “We wondered: how can we use these tools that we have to build more fruitful and exciting interactions into mundane video calls?”

How Gamification Kickstarts Innovative Thinking

In challenging the notion of what a video call should look like, the team took inspiration from platforms that blur the boundaries between a standard call and a virtual space, like Online Town and Passtime—platforms that are almost more like games than just video calling. “Mainstream videoconferencing platforms are enterprise tools, but now we’re discovering people want more out of meeting each other,” says Geert Eichhorn, Innovation Director at MediaMonks. “We’re missing the spatial element, so you’re seeing gaming platforms competing with video calling platforms.”

This gamification element is an important piece of the web app’s development. It can be difficult to explain the potential of an emerging technology, as everyone approaches it with a different technical background and understanding. Upon coming up with the idea of using computer vision to augment video calls, the team found that gamifying the technology could help users easily wrap their heads around the feature. A humorous video that captures the fast-paced energy of the game aims to not only demonstrate the app’s capabilities, but also kickstart new ideas in viewers’ minds.

“Finding that human element that makes it fun is what made this project a success,” says Mango. “We realized we could make ourselves move around and laugh. The hardest thing with these projects is portraying how it relates to us as functional human beings in time and space, and we need to be pioneers on how it evolves.”

Anticipating the Future of Connection and Collaboration

Connecting digitally through collaboration across borders and in video calls isn’t new to the MediaMonks team, though working from home has prompted people across the company to rethink the role that video calls play throughout the day, both inside and outside of working hours. Sure, there might be a happy hour call to keep teammates connected, but Monks have also been known to 24/7 virtual hangouts that serve no specific purpose—where people might not even talk to one another for the most part—simply to replicate the feeling of sharing a communal space with other people.

Beginning out of a necessity to make business calls more engaging, Eichhorn envisions other uses of the computer vision and machine learning as well. “I think this is going to be another frontier,” he says. “We’ve just used off-the-shelf models for this project, but in other iterations we can train the model for different purposes. What if you wanted to train an AI to rate your work from home outfit before jumping in a call?” He compares the technology to the popularity of Snapchat filters that have made their way out of the mobile space and into online business meetings.

On that note, the technology (and the scope of Labs’ thinking) isn’t limited to just the context of video conferencing. It could also be used to power live experiential activations at home by allowing users to engage with digital objects overlaying their webcam’s image, a bit like interacting with AR. But by starting with the humble video call—that technology that we all know far too well by now—the gamified web app offers a fun and accessible way to imagine how we can work to improve the tools that we use each day to enable closer connection.

Find out what else MediaMonks Labs is cooking up.