Simon Medina is the Sponsorship and Commercialisation manager at the Confluences museum in Lyon. He talks about how he used the high performance Beam telepresence solution to enable hospital patients to virtually attend the museum’s inauguration.
“We installed BEAM telepresence robots for the inauguration of the Confluences Museum. Our aim was to enable people who couldn’t travel to us physically to be able to attend this event from a remote location. Every fifteen minutes, a guide took a person who was virtually present thanks to their avatar for an interactive tour of the museum. This enabled people interested in natural history from around the world, and also adults and children in hospital, to discover our collections by means of a virtual tour. Our guides were enthusiastic about the idea of changing the way they do their job, and sharing their passion in a new way.
Each Beam robot was also accompanied by another person, in addition to the guide, to explain to other visitors how it works. This aroused tremendous curiosity and a lot of very positive feedback about each robot. On the strength of this success, we are thinking about how to deploy this principle of a mobile remote visit all year round. The partnership with Awabot and their telepresence solution enabled us to assert our determination to be a museum that uses the latest mediation tools. This is consistent with our identity: looking to the past to live for the present and the future.”
This innovative user-friendly mobile video conference solution used as part of a virtual tour enabled the Confluences Museum to try out high definition telepresence, and to envisage making the tour a permanent service available to the disabled or hospital patients.
Interview conducted in July 2015.
