Top 2000 online café

Especially for the twenty-year anniversary of the Top 2000, we built an interactive 360-degree version of the best-known music café in the Netherlands. With tours by Leo Blokhuis and Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, album covers full of stories and anecdotes, numerous image and sound fragments from pop history plus various quizzes, the Top 2000 online café is a paradise for music lovers. And all thanks to our own storytelling tool Micrio.

Storytelling on steroids
Dutch broadcasters NTR and NPO Radio 2 were looking for a way in which the Top 2000 café could be visited digitally. The starting point was the opening up of two decades of Top 2000 a gogo material. With the many beautiful broadcasts from the television program there was enough content for a rich form of storytelling. That is why together we quickly came up with Micrio, the technology we developed ourselves to view megapixel images easily and smoothly online. Earlier, the prize-winning Jheronimus Bosch and Experience the Night Watch interactives were built with Micrio. These online documentaries use a huge hi-res photo of a work of art, on which it is possible to zoom in to the pigment grains.

Smart technology at the service of the experience
The Top 2000 online café, just like the interactive for the drama series Hollands Hoop, adds a third dimension thanks to Micrio's support for 360-degree footage. In combination with features such as positional audio, music, video, markers and storytelling, the Netherlands' most musical café comes alive online. Due to the predictive logic behind Micrio, the 360-degree version reacts at lightning speed as visitors move through the café. In short, smart technology at the service of the end user experience.

Personal tours by Leo Blokhuis and Matthijs van Nieuwkerk
Visitors to the Top 2000 online café are welcomed by presenter Leo Blokhuis upon entering the virtual space. In the café they can then follow a personal tour of Blokhuis, but also of Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and NPO Radio 2 DJ Jan-Willem Roodbeen, who each tell about their own musical favorites. Visitors can also choose to go on a journey of discovery themselves along famous album covers with all kinds of references, to listen to famous Dutch people about encounters with their pop idols, or to a podcast with music lessons, play a (live) quiz, and much more. The editors of NPO Radio 2 have enriched the virtual café with a large amount of content that is also partly linked to current radio and television broadcasts. Put on your headphones, turn on the music, and discover the musical gems and their facts in the Top 2000 online café!

Joint experience
Due to the corona crisis, we expanded the Top 2000 online café a few months later with the possibility to experience the interactive together with other people. We created a chat tool for the Micrio interface, which allows a guide to invite other people to follow him or her in the online cafe so that everyone sees the same thing. The live pub quiz of the NTR could also be played together thanks to the new functionality, while quiz master Leo Blokhuis asked the questions.